"The Critique de la raison dialectique is a nineteenth-century man's magnificent and pathetic attempt to think the twentieth century. In that sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian and, I would even say, the last Marxist."

"What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology."

"Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov's contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted."

"I had gotten very much involved in the writings of the so-called Existentialists. Camus. Sartre. I retreated into myself and rejected practically everything outside. Only in the artificial surroundings of an isolated, virtually all-white college campus could I have allowed myself to cultivate this nihilistic attitude. It was as if in order to fight off the unreal quality of my environment, I leaped desperately into another equally unreal mode of living."

"During the last months of the German Occupation in 1944, the young man who was to become France's most controversial contemporary philosopher and the woman who was to become its most controversial feminist met the professional criminal who was to become its most controversial playwright."

"When I was growing up in the 60s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were a model couple, already legendary creatures, rebels with a great many causes, and leaders of what could be called the first postwar youth movement: existentialism — a philosophy that rejected all absolutes and talked of freedom, authenticity, and difficult choices. It had its own music and garb of sophisticated black which looked wonderful against a cafe backdrop. Sartre and De Beauvoir were its Bogart and Bacall, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between jazz club, cafe and writing desk, with forays on to the platforms and streets of protest. Despite being indissolubly united and bound by ideas, they remained unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of relationships. This radical departure from convention seemed breathtaking at the time."

"He was a generous and courageous man. He always defended the cause of the unfortunate, of the exploited, and of the oppressed. He always struggled for freedom, most often with the communists and, if necessary, against them. He believed in the strength of reason and in the contagious power of the idea of freedom. But above all, for me and I have said it several times, he was our Jean-Jacques Rousseau."

": From the introduction to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon."

"To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.The Doctor Prescribed Violence, Adam Shatz"

"[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us."

"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

"Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey."

"In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation."

"Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it."

"This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man."

"For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance."

"in order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak."

"the martyr's reflex"

"...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it."

"I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life"

"...the reality of society involves the socialization of certain unrealities."

"I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized."

"That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur."

"...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it."

"Thus, Beauty is neither an appearance nor a being, but a relationship: the transformation of being into appearance"

"For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value."

"Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being"

"...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality"

"The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it"

"He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him."

"...the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event"

"...for one cannot enter an image unless one makes oneself imaginary"

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

"The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us"

"For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling."

"The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/"

"For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday."

"Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it."

"Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible."

"Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster"

"The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness."

"Moral solipsism."

"It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake"

"He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues."

"His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind."

"But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die."

"Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding."

"The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes"

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