Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame.

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.

It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space.