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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Jean Genet

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Jean Genet
Age: 75 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 19
Died: 1986
Died: April 15
Author
Film Director
Film Editor
Military Personnel
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Paris
France
People
Constitute
Crimes
Ashamed
Crime
History
True
Real
Men

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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
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When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.
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We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky
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When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
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I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
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Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude
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Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
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In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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