It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.
It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
It is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one’s balance.[Beim Menschen ist es wie beim Velo. Nur wenn er faehrt, kann er bequem die Balance halten.]
It is such a happiness when good people get together – and they always do.
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.
It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.[C’est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens.]
In the age in which we live, people give nothing for nothing.[Car, dans le siécle ou nous sommes, On ne donne rien pour rien.]
