Educators From France

"In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary."

"Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea."

"The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it."

"Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen."

"I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers."

"Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity."

"One hardly saves a world without ruling it."

"A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb."

"A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions."

"Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty."

"A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate."

"I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers."

"Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often."

"For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion."

"No one can enjoy freedom without trembling."

"Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis."

"It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice."

"Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave."

"What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?"

"Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?"

"What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots."

"Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young."

"If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse."

"Pursued by our origins...we all are."

"A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints."

"The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual."

"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."

"The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning."

"A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis."

"If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity."

"The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment."

"Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious."

"No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim."

"On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.""

"Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?"

"The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer."

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

"I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . ."

"Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?"

"Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst."

"In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future."

"We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity."

"The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world."

"Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates."

"For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa."

"The Creation was the first act of sabotage."

"The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?"

"Only the idiot is equipped to breathe."

"However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens."

"To hope is to contradict the future."