“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. ”

“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.”

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