"What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be."

"My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength."

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

"This phrase isn't my own; it's from the pen of French writer Romain Rolland. But people credit me with having said it all the time—so frequently, in fact, that I might as well have said it myself."

"All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."