The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

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 extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

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

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.