We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation...

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after...

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be...

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

A melhor forma de determinar se uma pessoa foi expulsa do mbito da lei é perguntar se, para ela, seria melhor cometer um crime. Se um pequeno furto pode melhorar a sua posição legal, pelo...

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...