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Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

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
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
Writer
Drean
Camus
Greater
Reform
Upon
Tasks
Feels
Generation
Even
Mines
Doubtless
World
Mine
Preventing
Generations
Consists
Perhaps
Destroying
Called
Task

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Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
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I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.
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The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
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To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
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Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.
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If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
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There is merely bad luck in not being loved there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
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Those who write clearly have readers.
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The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
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What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?
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The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
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I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
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Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.
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The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
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We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
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I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
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Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
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The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.
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