Quotes
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
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.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
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.
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ''easy life of the gods'' would be a lifeless life.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.