The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

To-day violence is the rhetoric of the period.

Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked its surface.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.