The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.

Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.