“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.

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.

I think being young and, like, 14, 15, you feel like a weirdo, and playing guitar with my grandpa in my grandma’s kitchen is probably my fondest memories I’ll ever have.

Never lose interest in life and the world. Never allow yourself to become annoyed.

I don’t wear a lot of color. In fact, I don’t actually like color on myself. I love color but it’s very challenging, it’s very powerful, it can overpower you. I think if my eyes were closed and someone put a red jacket on me, I would be able to feel that it was red. I don’t feel great in color.

I think it’s a feeling like I’ve got it all figured out. There’s nothing that can shock me anymore. There’s nothing I haven’t anticipated; so at that point, there is a calmness.

I often see only my mistakes. I always feel I could have done better. Every artist goes through it.

You know when you’re sitting on a chair and you lean back so you’re just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.

Whenever you’re feeling down. And I am not around let the sight of me be the reason you smile.

Feeling we have nothing to offer others is our heart reminding us how much we have yet to give to ourselves.