The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.

Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.