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,...

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.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism...

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is...

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should...

the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the...

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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...