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

As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against hims….

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always car….

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda..

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altoge….

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startl….

To think and to be fully alive are the same..

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties..

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-bei….

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics..

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up..

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when sla….

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject..

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it ….

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning..

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, fina….

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it..

Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind al….

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse..

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

Every thought is an afterthought..