But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.