There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.
I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flowby the tilt of the social landscape.
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.
Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
A man by himself is in bad company.
One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure.
That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.
Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.
It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.
The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
Faith is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.
There is a radicalism in all getting, and a conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative.
It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.