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

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratize popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.

We are entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.

From the dark depths of my soul came an intense passion for prose.

Brave’ is very specific and extremely personal. Sometimes brave means letting everyone else think you’re a coward. Sometimes brave is letting everyone else down but yourself.

It often happens that those are the best people whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been picking at.

And what happens when you run out of words? You listen. Deeply. To everything around you.

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.