We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.