every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

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

It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.

power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.

By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears - both stand outside society.

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

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.