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"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
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"You cannot sensibly expect a starving 'God-fearing' man to honor the 8th commandment."
"Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world."
"Higher income either indicates higher intelligence or lesser morals!"
"The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling."
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help."
"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."
"There are enough in the novelty business without us; and we have something better to do. We have to give an account unto our God of what we do and say, and if we have been murderers of souls, it will be no excuse that we flourished the dagger well, or that when we gave them poison we mixed the draught cleverly, and presented it with poetical phrases."
"But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things."Like what?" said Adam suspiciously."Well... you could bring all the whales back, to start with."He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them?"She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes."An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you ask me to do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale."
"Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist."
"The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity."
Explore more quotes by Simone de Beauvoir
"Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself."
"I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive."
"As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light-it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it."
"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."
"Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority."
"To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well."
"Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down."
"Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up."
"If you haven't been happy very young you can still be happy later on but it's much harder. You need more luck."
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