“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.

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

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.

The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.

Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.

The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

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

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.