"Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster"

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

React to this quote

More by Jean-Paul Sartre

“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.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Not a single one of those deaths necessarily falls within the definition of genocide in the authoritative of 1948. It requires proof that the accused was responsible for the physical destruction of a …"

— Bruce Fein

Law1947

#art

"We still have many shortcomings and failures to fulfill the Party's demands, especially as regards the liquidation in some of our people of survivals of the accursed past in consciousness and conduct …"

— Filipp Golikov

Military1900–1980

#art

"Driving to the studio today, I passed a big football field. I had to look twice before I realized that the stands were jammed with people...thousands of them. I looked out on the playing field, and th…"

— Bill Downs

Journalism1914–1978

#art

"We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with acces…"

— David Graeber

Politics1961–2020

#art