If we don’t know our own history, we are deemed to live it.
To think and to be fully alive are the same.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power...
The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.
What I cannot live with may not bother another man’s conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.