“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

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.

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.

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.

There is no disease so destructive as lust.

My heart has a history of silent catastrophes.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn’t funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul.

If your love destroys me, consider my destruction glorious.

The war between my mind and my heart has been the biggest destruction of my peace.

Find me someone who has gone to the darkest parts of their own character where they were so close to their own self-destruction and found a way to get up and out of it, and I will bow on my knees to you. You’re my teacher.