The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.
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 has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
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 it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done – is the faculty of forgiving.
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
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.
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.
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.