What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

Racism is the snobbery of the poor.

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

Foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.

Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.

You are never too old or too young to be a leader.

Beautiful is sick, so we’re here to smother her back to health.

I just don't understand why those who fail to listen to others possess a habitual desire to be listened to.

I'm always tweeting about food and things that I've made.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

To enslave a people, give them money they didn't earn.

Shootouts are not gunfights of honor, they're gang wars and racial riots.

Men who are in earnest are not afraid of consequences.

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.