The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.

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.