The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.