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.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.