An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.