“Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploit...”

“After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse...”

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of ...”

“The necessity of reform mustnt be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tel...”

“[F]reedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars an...”

“The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write their plays and books, to paint their p...”

“The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into questio...”

“I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothin...”

“In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existencethe source of human freedomis never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obv...”

“With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.”

“The hobgoblin of a little mind may be the genius of a great one.”

“To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.”

“It's difficult being an intellectual in a bread and butter sort of town.”