“Knowledge is not for knowing, knowledge is for cutting.”

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.

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

It is always more difficult to fight successfully against Faith than against knowledge.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Is there any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Knowledge itself is power.