Jean Genet Quotes
"Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?"
- Jean Genet
(Related: Suicide)
"Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Dreams, Youth)
"What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Ideas, Hatred)
"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."
- Jean Genet
(Related: American, Country, Deep, Hatred, Man, Plants, Wonder)
"Violence is a calm that disturbs you."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Violence)
"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Elegance, Harmony, Taste)
"The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Revolution, Ideology, Man)
"The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Success, Fame, Heroes)
"Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Forbidden, Universe, World)
"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."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Power, End, May, Shadow)
"I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Eyes, Questions)
"I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Beauty, Cunning, Deep)
"I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Boldness, Danger, Lying, Name, Violence)
"Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man."
- Jean Genet
(Related: History, People, Man)
"A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle."
- Jean Genet
(Related: People, Shame, Wind)
"Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Betrayal, Ecstasy, Nothing)
"Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity."
- Jean Genet
(Related: Fact)