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For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Albert Camus

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Albert Camus
Age: 46 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 7
Died: 1960
Died: January 4
Author
Essayist
French Resistance Fighter
Journalist
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Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
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Drean
Camus
States
Crime
Persist
Persists
Trying
Hold
Centuries
Barbarous
Men
Century
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Law
Checks
Refinement
State
Forces
Equilibrium
Force
Instinct
Penalty
Often
Claims
Penalties
Refinements
Death
Constant
Instincts
Warring

More quotes by Albert Camus

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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
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A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
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If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters you finally hand over your brothers.
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The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
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That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.
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What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?
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[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!
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The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.
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Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
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None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
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To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
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The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.
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At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
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Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.
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He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
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Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
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In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
Albert Camus