“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.”

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.

I’m not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

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.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Whenever I found something remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people be informed thereof.

I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.