“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Everybody is somebody’s Jew.

At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.

In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: ‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

I’m totally not against plastic surgery. I’ve tried Botox before. That’s the only thing that I’ve done.

The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.

Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.