People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.