“It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.”

“The papers inclosed will shew that the nauseous project of amendments has not yet been either dismissed or despatched. We are so deep in them now, that right or wrong some thing must be done.”

“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”

“Contemporary man has begun to lose his naiveté as … the deep causes of the situation in which he finds himself are becoming clearer. He realizes that to attack these deep causes is the indispensable prerequisite for radical change. And so he has gradually abandoned a simple reformist attitude regarding the existing social order, for, by its very shallowness this reformism perpetuates the existing system.”

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”

“The reader has by now probably become accustomed to the reversals of fortune so common in astronomy.”

“Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.”

“Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.”

“My own position is somewhere in between. I am not sure that the economic arguments for an early step toward real union are very compelling. I have deep feelings, however, about the political necessity of creating in Western Europe an international framework which would bridge national sovereignties to such a degree as to give a different aspect to the German question by providing a home for the German people other than the national home and thus lifting German horizons beyond those national limits with which the Germans have shown themselves so incapable of coping.”

“[Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.”