Between Existentialism and Marxism Quotes

“We speak more freely of our emotional complexes than of our material condition or of our socio-professional milieu; we prefer to ask ourselves about the homosexual component of our characters than about the history which has made us and which we have made. We too are victims and accomplices of alienation, reification, mystification. We too stagger beneath 'the weight of things said and done', of lies accepted and transmitted without belief. But we have no wish to know it. We are like sleepwalkers treading in a gutter, dreaming of our genitals rather than looking at our feet.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism

“We still have not defined the intellectual yet: all we have are technicians of practical knowledge who either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism

“By extending the idea of natural law to the economic sphere - an inevitable but fundamental error - they (18th century philosophes) both secularized the economy and converted it into a domain external to man: a system of inflexible laws whose constraints permitted no modification.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism

“Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism

“You will proclaim through your work that you hold the universe at a distance.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism

“In my case, I chose writing in place of death, and because I lacked faith.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism