The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.

One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

Political institutions, no matter how well or badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being. Independent existence marks the work of art as a product of making; utter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.