“The order of the world is always right – such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.”

The world is not dialectical – it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each.

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

It imposes rhythms, it orders, it operates, it does not abandon the earth where its destiny must be fulfilled and whose own destiny must be fulfilled by it. Its history will be that of men and not of idle gods.

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

And if the years vanish in their course, they are still only successions of days that pass right through us as we pass through them in order to seek constantly what You have to show us.

I’m a parent, and I try to take care of my health and keep my life in order. In the last few years I’ve really had to decide what’s important to me, and it seems to me that my family and my health are top on the list. And those have nothing to do with show business.

If only men came made to order. It’s so hard to find a decent fellow.

God does not change us in order to love us. He loves us in order to change us.

Take the joy and bear the sorrow, looking past your hopes and fears: learn to recognize the measured dance that orders all our years.

When I’m out, maybe I’m looking at the fried chicken, but I know I need to order the grilled.