I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, good and bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal... At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone.
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! The farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.
Existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity.
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.
What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realises himself in realising a type of humanity, a commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch, and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment.
As for us, my little friend, we entered [the Communist Party] because we were tired of dying of hunger.