“Government is the right disposition of things.”

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.

Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools.

In our democracy officers of the government are the servants, and never the masters of the people.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.

The United States is a place where the men govern, but the women rule.

We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.