Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.