Jean-Paul Sartre

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

To be is to do.

The purpose of life is to live it.

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.

Irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. The rebel's weapon is the proof of his humanity.

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.

Every anti-communist is a dog.

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.

Our noble souls are racist.

How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure?

Pillaging is called shopping, and rape is practiced onerously in specialized shops.

It is and will be impossible to reestablish any sort of contact with the men who are currently at the head of the [French Communist Party]. Each sentence they utter, each action they take is the culmination of 30 years of lies and sclerosis.

What do you want to do with the [Communist] Party? A racing stable? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never use it for slicing? A party is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

To be is to choose oneself.

We are left alone, without excuse.

Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and as a result man is abandoned, because he cannot find anything to depend on within or outside himself.

The word 'existentialism' has been so much abused and so much misunderstood that I will try to explain what it means.