What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.