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

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

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

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.