I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons
Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Love by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.
Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Luck serves … as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst expect the best and take what comes.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.