The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. ★ To tell the truth is revolutionary. ★ I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. ★ I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. ★ My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall – that is my strength, my only strength. ★ History is at once freedom and necessity. ★ Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation. ★ Every State is a dictatorship. ★ Telling the truth is always revolutionary. ★ Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature. ★ Indifference is the dead weight of history. ★ What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be. ★ The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. ★ How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant–has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?
