When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody’s assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were...

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.

Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected...

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of...

I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In...

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken...

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which “the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to...

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

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

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: ”How do you want the world to be in fifty years?” and ”What do you want your life to be like five years from...

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more...

Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods /moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the...

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

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

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.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of...

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

It was as though in those last minutes he (Eichmann) was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil

Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to...

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of...

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

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.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal,...

Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Action without a name, a ”who” attached to it, is meaningless.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which...

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

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less,...