“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.

Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.

For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.

What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?

We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.

Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.

Evil comes from a failure to think.

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

We should not be too hasty in bestowing either our praise or censure on mankind, since we shall often find such a mixture of good and evil in the same character, that it may require a very accurate judgment and a very elaborate inquiry to determine on which side the balance turns.

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

Money is the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it.

The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

May I love you away from the evils of today to the dreams of tomorrow, you know heaven has no sorrow.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.