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

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

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

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

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

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.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Forgiveness empties the past of its power to empty the present of its peace.

Leaders who nurture followers to be leaders, keep leading even when they retire, and they keep winning the admiration of leading leaders

The heart of government, coated with whatever velvet gloves you want to put on it, is a mailed fist of force and coercion.

So who's the big red menace nowadays? Cuba. That's it? I'm sorry, but it's hard to whip up any us against them nationalist fervor about a country whose principal export is citizens who can swim.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.

He is safe who admits no one to his confidence.

There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.

Judgments of others contribute to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.