I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.