Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.

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.

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.