men

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.

It would seem that men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can hate one another. Once it was religion. Now it is the State.

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull facilities can comprehend only in the most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service.

The world needs heroes and it's better they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

. . . one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

. . . I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two thirds of the people of the earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.