"This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation."

"But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors"

"It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission"

"such mad confidence within despair."

"L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous."

"esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived."

"I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

"The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates."

"The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time."

"One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life."

"I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good."

"Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away."

"God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man."

"Adieu les monstres! Adieu les saints! Adieu l'orgueil! Il n'y a que des hommes."

"Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil."

"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."

"I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul."

"If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything."

"À celui qui donne un baiser ou un coup Rendez un baiser ou un coup Mais à celui qui donne sans que vous puissiez rendre Offrez toute la haine de votre coeur Car vous étiez esclaves et il vous asservit"

"We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God."

"I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it."

"One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day."

"I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm."

"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."

"If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner."

"Yes, Lord, you are innocence itself: how could you conceive of Nothingness, you who are plenitude? Your gaze is light and transforms all into light: how could you know the half-light in my heart?"

"I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be."

"Catherine: Why commit Evil? Goetz: Because Good has already been done. Catherine: Who has done it? Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising."

"I can be twenty women, one hundred, if that's what you want, all women. Ride with me behind you, I weigh nothing, your horse will not feel me. I want to be your whorehouse!"

"You see, I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists."

"It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall."

"Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it."

"Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent."

"Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done."

"It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth."

"Your church is a whore: she sells her favors to the rich."

"It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood."

"If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat."

"I know only one Church: it is the society of men."

"If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light."

"I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist."

"I know nothing, I am neither woman nor girl; I have been living in a dream and when someone kissed me, it made me want to laugh. Now I am here before you, it seems as though I have just awakened and it is morning."

"The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best."

"I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just."

"You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them."

"As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become."

"The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle."

"I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary."