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.
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 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.
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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 earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
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.
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
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.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
