Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

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

If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.