Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.

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