Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing
The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.
if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.
Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.
Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.
They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape.
Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.