There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.