Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

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

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.