There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people – we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.
The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations.
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.
It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.
It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest. A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness.
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
Spiritual stagnation ensues when man’s environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.
Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.
The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.