Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them.

Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides are not sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and that often, paradoxically, is literature that suffers for it.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

Genuine politics-politics worthy of the name, and the only politics I am willing to devote myself to-is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human.