Quote #138

He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs... The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

More from Albert Camus

  1. He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
  2. Heraclitus, the discoverer of the constant change of things, nevertheless set a limit to this perpetual process. This limit was symbolized …
  3. Half a man's life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent.
  4. Historical reasoning is not a type of reasoning that, within the framework of its own functions, can pass judgment on the world. While pret…
  5. From the moment that eternal principles are put in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason wil…
  6. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to hi…
  7. From the humanitarian idylls of the eighteenth century to the bloodstained gallows the way leads directly; and the executioners of today, a…
  8. History without a value to transfigure it, is controlled by the law of expediency.

All Albert Camus quotes