Quotes from book

History and Utopia

“Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.”

“To act is to anchor in the imminent future.”

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

“Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.”

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

“Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

“We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

“We are all secularised anarchists today.”

“Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.”

“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

“The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

“In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.”

“I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.”

“Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”