The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.

Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.

Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.

Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.

True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.

Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.