“For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.”

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.

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.

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.

In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being