“We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.”
“There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”
“The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.”
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
“A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.”
“Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.”
“It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.”
“Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.”
“To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.”
“There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.”
“Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.”
“When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.”
“There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.”
“Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.”
“A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.”
“An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”
“The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.”
“That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.”
“It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.”
“Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”
“The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.”
“Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.”
“It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.”
“When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.”
“A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.”
“We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.”
“Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.”
“The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.”
“The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.”
“With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.”