The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.

Alas, the gates of life never swing open except upon death, never open except upon the palaces and
gardens of death. And the universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden… What I
say today, and what I heard, exists and cries and howls beyond this garden, which is no more than a
symbol to me of the entire earth.

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.

Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.

Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder--immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse--humanity.

To Priests, Soldiers, Judges- to men who rear, lead or govern men I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.

But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.

The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap.

Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death -- since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source.

I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.

To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.

There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.

Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her -- for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious right a revolution was fought.

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

Tp Priests, Soldiers, Judges- to men who rear, lead or govern men I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.