Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.

Knowing what [Christ] knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

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.

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

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

To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.