The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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.

the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.

Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.