All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.
Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.
It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.
Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor.
The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.
We all carry fault within.
Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Thought and action must never part company.
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.
Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.
No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.
For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.