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

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

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

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.

Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.