Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.

They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

We have art in order not to die of life.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.