Great Throughts Treasury

"The demand for universal happiness and unhappiness widespread in our society are the most convincing signs that we live in a society dominated by work, but that does not have enough work to be satisfied."

"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition."

"The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live."

"The fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil"

"The fictional story reveals a maker just as every work of art clearly indicates that it was made by somebody; this does not belong to the character of the story itself but only to the mode in which it came into existence."

"The great advantage of the transformation is not only Love?s greater force in uniting what remains separate - when the Will uniting ?the form of the body that is seen and its image which arises in the sense, that is, vision ? is so violent that [it keeps the sense fixed on the vision once it has been formed], it can be called love, or desire, or passion? - but also that love, as distinguished from will and desire, is not extinguished when it reaches its goal but enables the mind ?to remain steadfast in order to enjoy it."

"The hard work and the effort, to get the goods necessary for life, and the pleasure of incorporate are so closely tied together in the biological cycle that the perfect elimination of pain and stress of the job not only would strip the biological life of its natural pleasures, but would deprive the specifically human life of its own vibrancy and vitality. The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms, which can be removed without changing life itself, are rather ways in which life , along with the need which is tied, it makes sense. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a life without vitality."

"The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons"

"The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution."

"The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life."

"The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth."

"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle."

"The language of the soul in its mere expressive stage, prior to its transformation and transfiguration through thought, is not metaphorical; it does not depart from the senses and uses no analogies when it talks in terms of physical sensations."

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

"The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true."

"The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness."

"The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibilityÄÄof being unable to undo what one has doneÄÄis the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself."

"The possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices."

"The real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no visible or invisible maker because it is not made. The only ?somebody? it reveals is its hero, and it is the only medium in which the originally intangible manifestation of a uniquely distinct ?who? can become tangible ex post facto through action and speech."

"The reluctance to recognize the Will as a separate, autonomous mental faculty finally ceded during the long centuries of Christian philosophy."

"The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."

"The space left to freedom is very small... ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all."

"The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil."

"The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only includes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts."

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."

"The specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and ?reified? only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate only to the drama, whose very name indicates that play acting actually is an imitation of acting."

"The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods."

"The Third World is not a reality but an ideology."

"The will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.""

"The world of politics in anything resembling kindergartens, in politics, obedience and support are the same thing. And just as you supported and complimented you a policy of men who did not wish to share the earth with the Jewish people or with certain other peoples of different nation-as though you and your superiors you had the right to decide who can and cannot have the world, we believe that no one, that is, no member of the human race may want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, the only reason why you have to be hanged."

"The word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education,"

"There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will."

"There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

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

"Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think."

"Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results."

"The worldliness of living things means that there is no subject that is not also an object and appears as such to somebody else, who guarantees its ?objective? reality. What we usually call ?consciousness.? the fact that I am aware of myself and therefore in a sense can appear to myself, would never suffice to guarantee reality."

"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious."

"To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises."

"This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes."

"To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings. These consequences are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reactino and where every process is the cause of new processes."

"This shows to what extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all."

"Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise"

"Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureau in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody."

"To show one?s anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance. In other words, the emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live."

"To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know."

"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."

"Today all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable. The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of a military-industrial-labor complex."

"Unlike thoughts an ideas, feelings, passions and emotions can no more become part and parcel of the world of appearances than can our inner organs. What appears in the outside world in addition to physical signs is only what we make of them through the operation of thought."

"War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford."