“Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”

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.

Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.

Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Courage is exhilarating.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.