The phenomenon of the will in Epictetus, a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.

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 altogether different than what had been thought.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don't you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

No one has the right to obey.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.