The entire stock of relationships which suited in war – militiae – was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace – domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.

No century has been more concerned than ours to do away with war: it has proved signally unsuccessful. All too little attention has been given to the phenomenon that internal politics have become increasingly more warlike.

A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.

The intellectual’s hostility to the businessman presents no mystery, as the two have, by function, wholly different standards. While the businessman’s motto is the customer is always right, the intellectual’s task is to preserve his perceived standards against the weight of popular opinion.

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.

Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.

As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.

There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.