Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.