The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.