Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?