The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.

Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

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