“Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.”

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.

Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.

We don’t need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.

Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.