“If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”

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.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

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

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.

It’s all about hope, kindness and a connection with one another.

ART is domination. It’s making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours.

We have to be respectful to one another.

One thing you have to have when you act is energy.

That the policies – from energy to labor policies, trade policies, government policies relating to debt and deficits are all aligning in such a way that America, far from being one of the places people are running from, is a place people are going to come to and add jobs.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

Being President is a little like being the grounds-keeper at a cemetery: there’s plenty of people below you but no one’s listening.