Accept no substitutes; I bring truth to the youth.
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
The usage of torture is contrary to all the dictates of nature and reason; even mankind itself cries out against it, and demands loudly the total abolition of it.
The Equality of the Citizens consists in this; that they should all be subject to the same Laws. This Equality requires Institutions so well adapted, as to prevent the Rich from oppressing those who are not so wealthy as themselves
Power without a nation's confidence is nothing.
I will live to make myself not feared.
I like to praise and reward loudly, to blame quietly.
Every day above earth is a good day.
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism.
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. ... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.
Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.