Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

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

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.

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.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.