💬 Quotes

"Let us acknowledge it for a proud misfortune that we have met thus early. The heart will not always be cheated."

"Food, and raiment, and lodging are indeed the things for want of which men and animals die; but the things which a man lives for, or dies for, are beauty, hope, love, and admiration."

"Remember that all the scholastic wisdom of the realm is a dead letter, if the university officers do not teach you to read; and to read is to go out, for a half-hour, every day, into a different society."

"The true nature of home is this: the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division."

"A man's power is active, progressive, defensene. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender."

"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but, on the other hand, their power of forgetting is huge. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must lard them in slogans until the very last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."

"Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in perpetual peace does it succumb."

"The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force."

"All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual urges, stirred up either by the cruel goddess of distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the masses."

"He alone owns the youth who gains the future."

"Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by principles of humanity that man is set above the rest of the animal world, but solely by the most brutal struggle."

"It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists."

"The thing that really saves you is that on the whole human beings are selfish and ignoble, and that they don't feel any great impulse to perform starry-eyed heroic actions for long periods."

"So much of it is filthy and boring and miserable, so like a football match with the side-issues of a seaside hotel, that it is difficult to realize that one is taking part in an historical event."

"The whole atmosphere of the town, with its foreigners and spies, its rumors and counter-rumors, was beastly; it was a sort of armed truce, with everyone watching his neighbor for a slip."

"History can be falsified, but so long as I am alive and my faculties are unimpaired I will never forget that I saw frontline troops equipped with telescopes cut out of cardboard."

"Every line of it is written from a subjective point of view... I warn every reader to put my book down if he wants a coolly balanced 'impartial' history of the Spanish war."

"Of knights, of ladies, loves and feats of arms, / Of courteous acts, of valiant combats I sing."

"What does not love? or rather, what can not / This tyrant love, that brings the world to naught?"

"All human things are subject to decay, / And when fate summons, monarchs must obey."