Great Throughts Treasury

"Man?s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world."

"Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization - the man-made artifact to house successive generations - would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other."

"Men in plural? can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves."

"Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future?with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals?have a worse record to show in these "sciences" than in almost any scientific endeavor."

"Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it."

"Moreover, if it is the insertion of man that breaks up the indifferent flow of everlasting change by giving it an aim, namely himself, the being who fights it, and if through that insertion the indifferent time stream is articulated into what is behind him, the past, what is ahead of him, the future, and himself, the fighting present, then it follows that man?s presences causes the stream of time to deflect from whatever its original direction or (assuming a cyclical movement) ultimate non-direction may have been."

"No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special occasions."

"No civilization ; would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change; Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other"

"Not man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth."

"No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature?s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings."

"Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer... but nobody is the author."

"Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses."

"Of all the activities necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bios politikos, namely action (praxis) and speech (lexis), out of which rises the realm of human affairs ? from which everything merely necessary or useful is excluded."

"Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began."

"One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

"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."

"Only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequalled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings and transgression."

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

"Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -- moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -- but no opinion."

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

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by ?a world of enemies? - ?one against all? - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."

"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."

"Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ..."

"Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed."

"Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company."

"Poets... are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one."

"Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence."

"Power corrupts... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power... far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one."

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

"Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution."

"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future."

"Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning."

"Since the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state."

"Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason?s inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only ?understand? what is past what neither remove it nor ?rejuvenate it? ... have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind?s impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume?s famous dictum that ?Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,? that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason?s uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world?s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man?s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness?the old hen pan, ?the all is one??either a single source or a single ruler."

"Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company."

"That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party."

"Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for world existence."

"Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he [Augustine] holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions - the motions of the soul - in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For ?nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love.? Hence, in the Confessions: ?My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am born.? The soul?s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love."

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

"The basic error of all materialism in politics - and this materialism is not Marxian and not even modern in origin, but as old as our history of political theory - is to overlook the inevitability with which men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object."

"The blessing of life as a whole... can never be found in work."

"The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven.""

"The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object."

"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, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene."

"The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error."

"The danger is that these theories are not only plausible, because they take their evidence from actually discernible present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with reality and factuality."

"The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one."

"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."

"The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed."

"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."