“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.

In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

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.

Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.

It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.

The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.

While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.

In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side – there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.

Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.

I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent.