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.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.