Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world--and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish--she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.