“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of corsairs.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

There is no glory in punishing.

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

It’s amazing how people like judging.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort, and pleasure.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.

I’m not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself.

I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.

Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

If you don’t think of the future, you won’t have one.

Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.