“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.”

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

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.

Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.

If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions.

As the antagonism between those who possess, and those who do not, is becoming more acute day after day.

The antagonism between nationalities will lose all its acuteness on the day when neither the iniquitous tendency to oppression and domination, nor the perpetual danger of the threatening preparations for war will exist.

The feeling (“sens”, Fr.) of solidarity that is born amidst a community rest on the feeling of antagonism arouse (aroused ? arose ?… sorry, – “suscité”, Fr.) by those who are opposed to it.