Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.

Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.