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

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

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

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.

It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space.