Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

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.

Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

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

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.