“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?”

Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions and him entirely and all together.

What are we doing here, that is the question.

Good words,” I replied. “But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember you don’t forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.

Men should not petition for rights, but take them.

Shooting at a man who is returning the compliment means going into action with the greatest speed of which a man’s muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and muscular actions which trick shooting involves.