"In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary."

"Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing? Hugo: No. Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death. Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even."

"Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?"

"It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute."

"I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens."

"I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man's world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?"

"Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong."

"I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living."

"What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never use it for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power."

"Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins."

"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."

"I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!"

"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."

"The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being."

"Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being."

"Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it."

"But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride."

"Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse."

"Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear."

"Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence."

"Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act."

"They are in bad faith — they are afraid — and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls."

"Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets."

"Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul."

"You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen."

"Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone."

"I felt less alone when I didn't know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans."

"A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work."

"Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her."

"What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me."

"Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn't have a few pounds left."