I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education.