Anti Stalinist Left

"I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless."

"I could see clearly that this problem could only be solved on the individual and personal level; political revolt is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre had been neatly hog-tied by their earlier radicalism. Camus came to see that rebellion is a political roundabout that revolves back to the same old tyranny; too ashamed to admit that he had outgrown his leftism, he found himself in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Sartre accused Camus of being a reactionary; but he paid for his own refusal to reexamine his political convictions by congealing into a grotesque attitude of permanent indignation, shaking his fist at some abstract Authority. Where politics is concerned, he seemed determined to be guided by his emotions."

"There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."

"We all have a weakness for beauty."

"Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"

"Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments."

"Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island."

"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom."

"I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false."

"What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?"

"When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak."

"A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge."

"Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life."

"The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy."

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question."

"N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours."

"For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style."

"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."

"God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves."

"Let's not beat around the bush; I love life — that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life."

"Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!"

"Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself."

"In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all."

"This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right."

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

"There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it."

"La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent."

"L'homme enfin n'est pas entièrement coupable — il n'a pas commencé l'histoire — ni tout à fait innocent, puisqu'il la continue."

"Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature."

"No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession."

"The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it."

"In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe."

"Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world."

"The artist reconstructs the world to his plan."

"A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously."

"The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall."

"A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists."

"Alyosha can, in fact, treat Ivan with compassion as a "real simpleton." The latter only made an attempt at self-control and failed. Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the world. These are the Grand Inquisitors who imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and unification of the world. The first step is to conquer and rule. The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men — a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Caesars, because they were the first to understand — and later, with time, by all men. The unity of all creation will be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted. The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired, for the knowledge he possesses is bitter. He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil. He has pity, a cold pity, for the silent prisoner whom history endlessly deceives. He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and, in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the Caesars. But the prisoner does not speak."

"Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil."

"Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred."

"The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order."

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

"Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others."

"I rebel — therefore we exist."

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

"Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated."