There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

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.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.