We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action.

A nation without dregs and malcontents, is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

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.

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.