Everything Quotes

Those who serve as ministers can be compared to hands: reaching up, they take care of the head; reaching down, they take care of the feet.

If a ruler can get rid of private crookedness and promote the public law, his people will become secure, and his state will become well ordered.

A ruler of men faces two possible misfortunes: if he employs the worthy, the ministers will use worthiness as a pretext to rob their ruler of his power, but if he promotes men recklessly, his affairs will be neglected, and he will not prevail.

Within the frontiers of a state, there are no more than ten people who do good of themselves, whereas if one makes it so that the people can do no wrong, the entire state can be kept peaceful.

The intelligent ruler makes the law select men and makes no arbitrary appointment himself; he makes the law measure merits and makes no arbitrary judgment himself.

Superior and inferior wage one hundred battles a day.

If a ruler of men wants to put an end to vice, he must examine the correspondence between form and name and look to see how what is said differs from what is done.

He who is vain and delights in his own ability is deceived by his inferiors. When he likes to bring forth arguments and kindliness, his inferiors take advantage of his abilities.

If you rely on political factions to promote men to office, the people will work to develop instrumental relationships and will not seek to be useful with regard to the law. Thus, a ruler who mistakes reputation for ability when assigning offices will see his state fall into disorder.

The people in the well-ordered ages of the past upheld the public law and abandoned private strategies; they focused their intentions and unified their conduct. Everything they did was for the sake of being employed by the ruler.

A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.

When an enlightened ruler controls his ministers, he makes it so that ministers cannot get credit for achievements gained by overstepping the bounds of their offices or make proposals and then fail to match them with actual achievements.

The severe household has no fierce slaves, but it is the affectionate mother.

If ministers forget their ruler and establish relationships with foreign powers in order to advance the interests of their confederates, there will be scant reason for subordinates to obey their superiors.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

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

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

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

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.

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.

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.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

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

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

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.

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.

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

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

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

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.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.