“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

“Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”

“That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.”

“War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.”

“When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.”