“Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and insight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

The game is worthwhile in so far as we don’t know what will be the end.

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.

The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.

One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one.

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

You can take a kid out of Rosengård, but you can never take Rosengård out of that kid.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

Men talk of heaven, – there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell, – there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk and future lives, – O love, there is no other life – but here.