I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.