“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.”

When 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.

Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.

Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.

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.

Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.

One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.

Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind.

When your life is working there will be an absence of drama.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.