The Rebel Quotes
"With the publication of this book a cloud that has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift."
"If we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value."
"Social values are rules of conduct implicit in a tragic fate; and they offer a hope of creation."
"Revolt is one of the 'essential dimensions' of mankind."
"The strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions."
"Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender of which Barrès speaks, is still today at the basis of the struggle."
"Rebellion carries with it the very idea of restraint, and 'moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion.'"
"We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages."
"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined."
"One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand."
"On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence—it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself."
"In the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in relation to murder."
"Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible."
"A mind imbued with the idea of the absurd will undoubtedly accept fatalistic murder; but it would never accept calculated murder."
"What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation."
"Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right."
"The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness."
"The greatest degree of destruction coincides with the greatest degree of affirmation."
"The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him."
"The struggle between Satan and death symbolizes this drama."
"Murder, in fact, is on the way to becoming acceptable."
"The romantic hero is 'fatal' because fate confounds good and evil."
"Satan rises against his Creator because the latter employed force to subjugate him."
"The romantic hero considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an unrealizable good."
"If the suffering of children serves to complete the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now onward that truth is not worth such a price."
"The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and at beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone 'with a future.'"
"They are a sacrilege, as truth sometimes is."
"To maintain the myth, those decisive letters must be ignored."
"A great and praiseworthy poet, the greatest of his time, a dazzling oracle—Rimbaud is all of these things."
"Is this the mythical hero, worshipped by so many young men who, though they do not spit in the face of the world, would die of shame at the mere idea of such a belt?"
"Only at this point does his passion, and with it his truth, begin."
"The fury of annihilation, appropriate to every rebel, then assumes its most common form."
"The apocalypse of crime—as conceived by Rimbaud in the person of the prince who insatiably slaughters his subjects—and endless licentiousness are rebellious themes that will be taken up again by the surrealists."
"The struggle, the crime itself, proved too exacting for his exhausted mind."
"An urgent appeal to absent life is reinforced by a total rejection of the present world."
"The refusal to draw any conclusions is flat, decisive, and provocative."
"Absolute rebellion, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and cult of the absurd—such is the nature of surrealism."
"The real Dadaists are against Dada. Everyone is a director of Dada."
"Surrealism, the gospel of chaos, found itself compelled, from its very inception, to create an order."
"All that they have preserved is the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence, dedicated to perpetual strife and to the struggle of wills bent on seizing power."
"The hatred of formal virtue—degraded witness to divinity and false witness in the service of injustice—has remained one of the principal themes of history today."
"The partially justified pretension of modern Communism, like the more frivolous claim of Fascism, is to denounce the mystification that undermines the principles and virtues of the bourgeois type of democracy."
"Divine transcendence, up to 1789, served to justify the arbitrary actions of the king."
"The conqueror is always right; that is one of the lessons which can be learned from the most important German philosophical system of the nineteenth century."
"All morality becomes provisional. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their most profound manifestations, are centuries that have tried to live without transcendence."
"The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power."
"The struggle against creation will therefore be without mercy and without ethics, and the only salvation lies in extermination."
"To be recognized by another consciousness, man should be ready to risk his life and to accept the chance of death."
"The magnificent idea that all idealism is chimerical if it is not paid for by risking one’s life was to be developed to the fullest possible extent by young men who were not engaged in expounding the concept from the safe distance of a university chair before dying in their beds, but among the tumult of falling bombs and even on the gallows."
"Evolution is far more important than living." - Junger
"The worker is removed from the sphere of negotiation, from pity, and from literature and elevated to the sphere of action."
"When the race is in danger of being oppressed, the question of legality plays only a secondary role." - Hitler
"The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished will always be the accused." - Göring
"One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves."
"Nothing beyond the State, above the State, against the State. Everything to the State, for the State, in the State." - Mussolini
"All of us here below believe in Adolf Hitler, our Führer."
"An end that requires unjust means is not a just end."
"If the German people are incapable of victory, they are unworthy to live." - Hitler
"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the disappearance of the proletariat."
"Capitalism becomes oppressive through the phenomenon of accumulation."
"A society without anguish, it is easy to ignore death."
"The struggle waged by one or two generations throughout a period of economic evolution which is, perforce, beneficial."
"The dialectic correctly applied cannot and must not come to an end."
"If socialism is an eternal evolution, its means are its end."
"The end of history is not an exemplary or a perfectionist value; it is an arbitrary and terroristic principle."
"The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice."
"Marx never dreamed of such a terrifying apotheosis."
"The bourgeois State owes its survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression."
"The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary—first, to crush or suppress what remains of the bourgeois class."
"The revolution, before being either economic or sentimental, is military."
"With action as its unique principle, and with the kingdom of man as an alibi, it has already begun, in the east of Europe, to construct its own armed camp."
"The revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historical values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion."
"The novel is born at the same time as the spirit of rebellion and expresses, on the æsthetic plane, the same ambition."
"Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously."
"The artist reconstructs the world to his plan."
"The Gorgon is, doubtless, a purely imaginary creature; its face and the serpents that crown it are part of nature."
"Even pure geometry, where abstract painting sometimes ends, still derives its color and its conformity to perspective from the exterior world."
"Revolution without honor, calculated revolution...puts resentment in the place of love."
"Rebellion proves in this way that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot be denied without renouncing life."
"The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free."