“To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers”

In order to improve democracy, then, it’s necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle.

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

Without mathematics, we are blind.

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

In order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny.

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.

The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure.

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age.

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word ‘terrorist’ is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

North Korea referred to The Interview as absolutely intolerable and a wanton act of terror.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.

People like me make modern life intolerable.

It is very pleasant to scratch an itching ring-worm, but the sensation one gets afterwards is very painful and intolerable.