“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.”

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.

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.

In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.

I will minimize your place in my life till your absence is no longer an issue.

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.

Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me – they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are programs.

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.

I have no idea how I made it this far without you.

Never find fault with the absent.