I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple.

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.