“Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.”

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.

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.

What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

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.

Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.

I believe with all my heart God’s Story has a happy ending. . . But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise.

When we receive Holy Communion, we experience something extraordinary – a joy, a fragrance, a well-being that thrills the whole body and causes it to exalt.

Today on planet Earth, may you experience the wonder and beauty of yourself as Abba’s Child and temple of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ

This is something called “walking meditation.” The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking.

I think that god places a special gift of courage in our heart to handle every experience we don’t think we can get through.

People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.

I would be a giraffe because I just want to experience what a sore throat and being a giraffe feels like. It would be really uncomfortable walking around in the Sahara and being like, ‘I really need, like, 15 lozenges for my giraffe body.’