I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.
In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.
But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."
The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.
Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.
Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.
My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry.
