“Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.

I decided to be what crime made of me.

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Cruel men are the greatest lovers of Mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in other, not in themselves.

While people are struggling unhappily in the cities against the cruel authorities, a waterfall happily and cheerfully flows in the nature; there is happiness only if there is freedom!

Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.

Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths. It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do. A lover whose passion is extreme loves even the faults of the beloved.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

I seem to you cruel and too much addicted to gluttony, when I beat my cook for sending up a bad dinner. If that appears to you too trifling a cause, say for what cause you would have a cook flogged.