When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.

The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

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.

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.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as fuel of achievement.

Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.