By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.