Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.