“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 great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

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.

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.

Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

I think I’ll have a large order of prognosis negative.

It is sheer madness to live in want in order to be wealthy when you die.

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.

Your steps are being ordered by the Lord. If He allowed it to happen, He’s going to bring good out of it.