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,...

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.