Hannah Arendt

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."