“Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.”
“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”
“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.”
“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.”
“The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.”
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
“A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
“I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?”
“Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.”
“What is a society without a heroic dimension?”