Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.