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

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

“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.”

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”