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.
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
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 likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
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 these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
El ámbito público ha perdido el poder de iluminación que formaba parte de su naturaleza original. En los países del mundo occidental, en el que, desde el declive del mundo antiguo, se ha considerado la de emanciparse de la política como una de las libertades básicas, un número cada vez mayor de personas hace uso de esa libertad y se apartan del mundo y de sus obligaciones en él [...]. Pero con cada uno de esos abandonos se le inflige al mundo una pérdida casi demostrable: lo que se pierde es el compromiso específico y, habitualmente, irreemplazable que debería haberse formado entre el individuo y sus prójimos.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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.
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 its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
