"Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being"

Jean-Paul Sartre Philosophy See all quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre →

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“It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.”

“Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

“For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.”

“Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.”

“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”

“Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.”

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"Whatever I do, whichever way I turn, I can neither feed nor clothe my family, nor take part in public affairs as a citizen, nor speak the truth as I conceive it, without being stained with the blood o…"

— George D. Herron

Social Activism1862–1925

#truth

"I know that there are those that are saying to the individuals who are involved in the freedom struggle, slow up for a while; you're pushing things too fast. Or they may say, adopt a policy of moderat…"

— Martin Luther King

Social Activism1929–1968

#justice

"But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And …"

— George Fox

Religion1624–1691

#hope

"The 1930s — a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said a…"

— Wilfrid Sheed

Literature1930–2011

#wisdom