The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.

The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principle motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.