“Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.”

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.

Knowledge exists potentially in the human soul like the seed in the soil; by learning the potential becomes actual.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

Education is the manifestation of perfection already existing in man.

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Despair exists only when there is hope.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

If we want to change existing conditions, we must first transform ourselves, which means that we must become aware of our own actions, thoughts and feelings in everyday life.