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

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

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.

the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.