“The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.”

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.

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.

On the fields of Media, of Arabia, and of Armenia, two great armies will assemble thrice. The host near the bank of the Araxes, they will fall in the land of the great Suleiman.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.

To the Spains will come a very powerful king, by land and sea subjugating the South; This will cause harm, lowering again the crescent, clipping the wings of those of Friday.

There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, and truth will again triumph.

Crisis is the path to happiness. Decay and disintegration do not spell doom, but ascent and beginning. The powerful forces of a new creation operate in the hush beyond the noise of the day.

Nature’s creative power is far beyond man’s instinct of destruction.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.