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

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.