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

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.