Jean Genet Quotes

"A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."
-Jean Genet in Dreams quotes.

"I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty-a sunken beauty."
-Jean Genet

"The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology."
-Jean Genet

"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

"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile."
-Jean Genet

"Violence is a calm that disturbs you."
-Jean Genet in Violence quotes.

"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."
-Jean Genet

"Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?"
-Jean Genet