 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. |
| Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. |
| 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. |
| Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. |
| By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality. |
| Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. |
| 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 defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. |
| 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. |
| The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. |
| 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. |
| Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. |
| Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. |
| War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford. |
| The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. |
| 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. |
