albert camus resistance rebellion and death essays

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Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

By albert camus, part of vintage international, category: essays & literary collections | philosophy.

Aug 29, 1995 | ISBN 9780679764014 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780679764014 --> Buy

Oct 31, 2012 | ISBN 9780307827852 | ISBN 9780307827852 --> Buy

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About Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Twenty-three political essays that focus on the victims of history, from the fallen  maquis  of the French Resistance to the casualties of the Cold War. In the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Albert Camus said that a writer “cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” Resistance, Rebellion and Death displays Camus’ rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger , The Rebel , and The Myth of Sisyphus .

Also in Vintage International

Also by Albert Camus

About Albert Camus

Born in Algeria in 1913, ALBERT CAMUS published The Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car… More about Albert Camus

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“ Resistance, Rebellion, and Death bears witness to the passionately scrupulous sense of responsibility which made Camus the kind of man and the kind of writer he was.” —The Christian Science Monitor

Table Of Contents

Letters to a German Friend The Liberation of Paris The Blood of Freedom The Night of Truth Pessimism and Tyranny Pessimism and Courage Defense of Intelligence The Unbeliever and Christians Why Spain? Defense of Freedom Bread and Freedom Homage to an Exile Algeria Preface to Algerian Reports Letter to an Algerian Militant Appeal for a Civilian Truce Algeria 1958 Hungary Kadar Had His Day of Fear Socialism of the Gallows Reflections of the Guillotine The Artist and His Time The Wager of Our Generation Create Dangerously

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Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays Paperback – Aug. 29 1995

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• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date Aug. 29 1995
• Dimensions 13.21 x 1.52 x 20.27 cm
• ISBN-10 0679764011
• ISBN-13 978-0679764014
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Resistance, Rebellion, and Death displays Camus's rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reissue edition (Aug. 29 1995)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679764011
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679764014
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 204 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 1.52 x 20.27 cm
• #330 in French Literature (Books)
• #825 in Literary Essays (Books)
• #880 in Ethics & Morality (Books)

About the authors

Justin o'brien.

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Albert Camus

Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: ""No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."".

Camus was born in Algeria to a Pied-Noir family, and studied at the University of Algiers from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to ""denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photograph by United Press International [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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9780679764014

Albert Camus

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

31 October 2012

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The monthly magazine of opinion.

Resistance, Rebellion & Death, by Albert Camus

Practically everyone has agreed to call Albert Camus a moralist, as if it were clear what the term means, at least as applied to him. But is it so clear? As far as I can see, Camus never recommended any particular ethic, nor was he an exceptionally “good” man, certainly not if we judge him by conventional standards. During the Resistance, Camus behaved with heroism; so did many others whom we have no reason to call “moralists.” I knew another hero of the Resistance who once said to me: “There is no such thing as courage; believe me, I know.” From what I have heard, if anyone ever showed courage, it was this man.

Perhaps in calling Camus a moralist, people mean that he invoked moral norms in judging political action. In fact, I think this is exactly what people do mean—people in this country, that is; in France, the term “moralist” is understood differently, and—why not say it?—more finely. No, we cannot locate Camus the moralist by considering only his political judgments. Though we shall have finally to vindicate these judgments, too; his “morals,” after all, gave interest to his “politics.”

Camus expressed feelings; this is something few contemporary writers do—or even want to do. Moreover, the kind of feelings he made vivid are those we ourselves have felt only incipiently, not fully, yet recognize that we should have felt more completely when we read their expression by him. He is the poet of what we ought to have felt in a given situation, but did not quite feel. Reading him, we wish we had.

He was a moralist, then, in his attentiveness to, and cult of, the better, the nobler feeling; he was not importantly the moralist of the better or more decisive act. However, action is modified by sensibility, and feeling what ought to be felt is itself a kind of doing. In striving to feel what ought to be felt, there is, of course, always the risk of being insincere, of falling into pose. Nowadays, people generally, and writers particularly, do not like such risk; Camus did; he has been accused of pose; and at times I myself thought the charge just. Yet for me, Camus’s best quality is not diminished by the fact that it was not always with him. What you ought, you can, said Kant. He should have added: not always. Besides, there are any number of occasions when it is easier to do what you should than to feel as you ought.

How is one to feel about the death of a friend? Surely this is something we cannot know in any other way than by feeling as we have perhaps not felt. When Camus died, how many of those who had been his friends were able to respond to the event as he himself did to the deaths of persons dear to him? Here is Camus on the death of René Leynaud, a resistance comrade, executed by the Germans in June of 1944: “Truth needs witnesses. Leynaud was one of them, and that is why I miss him today. With him here, I saw more clearly, and his death, far from making me better, as the books of consolation say, made my revolt more blind . . . no good is done to men by killing their friends. . . . And who can ever justify this dreadful death? What are duty, virtue, honors compared to what was irreplaceable in Leynaud? Yes, what are they but the paltry alibis of those who remain alive? We were cheated of a man three years ago. . . .”

How ought one to feel about the fact that each day men are executed by the state in punishment for crime? I am not asking what we are to think about the necessity for capital punishment; that question, according to Camus, Arthur Koestler’s famous essay answered decisively in the negative. Camus writes: “I share absolutely Koestler’s conviction; the death penalty besmirches our society, and its upholders cannot reasonably defend it.” But Camus, in his wonderfully eloquent “Reflections on the Guillotine,” adds to Koestler’s indictment of capital punishment a felt response to the circumstances of state executions in France; his words are bound to move one beyond the force of mere argument: “The state conceals its executions and keeps silent. . . hence it doesn’t believe in the exemplary value of the penalty, except by tradition and because it has never bothered to think about the matter . . . the criminal is killed because this has been done for centuries . . . a law is applied without being thought out, and the condemned die in the name of a theory in which the executioners do not believe.” Here is Camus again: “Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many-laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared ? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.” However well you can reason, if you fall even a little bit short of such indignation, can you really be intelligent on the subject of capital punishment?

_____________

I have been quoting from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death , a collection of Camus’s journalistic pieces and essays, selected by him for translation into English. The volume is just off the press and should add importantly to the image of Camus formed by American readers of his novels and plays. Here we see Camus at his most spontaneous, responding to problems as they arose and to events as they occurred, from the most personal troubles to the invasion of Hungary, and responding as an individual who happens to be able to write, rather than with care for his career as a writer. Yet these twenty-three pieces are beautifully done. People who do not read French may be unacquainted with Camus’s journalistic writings; in France he is regarded as one of the great journalists of our time. Indeed, his career suggests that at this particular juncture of human and literary history, it is practically impossible to be a great writer if one disdains to be a journalist. By which I do not mean to suggest that much of what we read in the press or the reviews is even good journalism.

But whether they adapt themselves to journalism or avoid it, other contemporary writers have in the main differed from Camus in this respect: if they dealt with feeling at all, they tried to describe not what ought to be felt but what is in fact felt, and I will make bold to say that when writers address themselves to this objective they end up often enough by describing what ought not to be felt, for such feeling is most likely to strike readers as the real thing. If Camus sometimes seems to us falsely noble, we should recognize that his contemporaries, and one of the greatest of them, Sartre, equally often fall into the ignoble, mistaking it for the real. What I want to contrast with Camus’s consciously aimed-at “nobility” is the kind of moral pornography so common in contemporary writing, and as conspicuous in a major figure like Jean-Paul Sartre as in a fifth-rate talent like Budd Schulberg.

(I am writing as if the term “moral pornography” were a cliché of current criticism ; unfortunately this is not the case, so I shall have to define it. I mean by it the taking of pleasure in what is disapproved of morally. We are supposed to get pleasure from good action, right feeling; if these do not exist we ought to suffer from their absence; were we more convinced of the above proposition we would be careful never to ignore any real instances of good action or right feeling. But just as the pornographer pure and simple wants to enjoy without sexual desire, many of our writers want to please us and themselves by describing what properly should give them and us pain.)

The interesting point here is that when you strive to feel what ought to be felt you can only succeed by actually feeling. In the description of the morally low, your feelings should be, if anything, even more at stake. But are they? Sartre, for example, has a predilection for describing base people and low actions coldly. Shulberg, being more jejune, does the same thing with even a certain happiness. Now, Camus was at the opposite pole from these writers, both in his successes and in his failures.

Sartre is, to be sure, the greater intellectual figure; I think Camus would have granted this, though he might have asked: “What’s the good of so much thinking if he [Sartre] is nearly always wrong?” Which brings me to a final but rather difficult point: in what sense was Camus right—right, that is, in his political judgments, which comprise so important a part of his work?

It cannot be denied that Camus did tend to judge political events morally, and he has to stand or fall, as a thinker, by this attitude. And did not this involve his setting feeling above thought? And if it did, however fine his expression of feeling, should we take his thought seriously?

At different times, I have been of different minds about this, and some years back I criticized Camus in the pages of Partisan Review for minimizing the intellectual element entering into political judgment. I want to retract that criticism here and now. Many things have happened since then, and I am inclined to believe, at this moment, that Camus’s judgment was sounder than I thought it was ten years ago. The reason I was against political moralizing was that I was for the distinction Machiavelli had introduced between the political and the moral good, and I thought that Camus’s way of thinking tended to obliterate this distinction. But is the distinction really so valid? Machiavelli, after all, could think of no wider horizon than the Florentine Republic; nowadays entities like the United States and the Soviet Union are dwarfed by the felt presence of a larger, if inchoate, entity, humanity. Neither Russia nor the United States can any longer convincingly claim that its self-interest is identical with the interest of everyone. Neither Russia nor the United States can now represent the universal; they have been reduced to the status of particular beings, and as such are subject, suddenly, to moral criticism. Which is what Camus maintained.

It should be observed that political groups or tendencies which, in recent times, set their goals above moral criticism have yielded to the temptations of political pornography, even as certain writers, eliminating any reference to an “ought” in their description of feeling, have fallen, almost inevitably, into moral pornography. Mussolini was pornographic in his “castor oil” criticism of his political victims; Hitler’s anti-Semitism was pornography in the most violent form this century has seen; but what else are we to call the Communist charge that the U.S. had used germ warfare in the Korean war? Yet Sartre himself supported this charge, although he knew perfectly well that it was false. In yielding to such pornography, I suggest he was helped along by the moral pornography in his own writings.

Camus had seen a great state, Germany, under Hitler act in defiance of every moral notion we can think of as law. He never forgot that fact; once this had happened he could never accept the view that morality and politics are independent of each other. Sometimes he tried to reduce the political to the moral too simply, as when he argued that all political issues could be reduced to the question: are you for or against murder? If he was willing to apply this question as a test in Hungary, he was much more hesitant when it came to judging French policy in Algeria. Yet I think his feeling on this most important matter was sound, and all that has happened recently, and all that is likely to happen, justifies him, morally to be sure, but also intellectually.

1 A review of Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien (Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pp., $4.00).

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Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays

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RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 13, 1960

Biographically speaking, there is nothing as definitive concerning a man's life as the asides he speaks- to himself or while facing an audience. Letters and speeches written at the moment and not organized into a timeless work reveal more of a person's life and thought than any rote biography by an admirer. This is precisely what this book is. It does not explain Albert Camus. It reveals him. This is its first value. Here we find Camus' letters written during the war to a German friend, attempting to sift his love for his country despite its weaknesses and insanities. For himself and France Camus has tried to judge his own land and culture, to tap its vital bloodstream, discover its worth, and thus "absurdly" enter the larger family of mankind. For Americans, the book has an added value. Here is a man who speaks our own language, the traditional language of America in constant criticism of itself. And perhaps this explains the reading public's great affinity for this European. Finally the collected asides give us a greater insight into Camus' thinking. He details his war effort and distinguishes his support of killing from that of murdering. He etches his homeland, Algeria, attempting to preserve the familiar relationship of the past and the independence required of the present. Through his love of justice he exerts a forceful resistance against Christianity and Communism, though he respects both. Yet his passionate love of justice becomes quicksand and unveils his deep religious feeling. After all, as Camus says, "The only real artist then is God...all other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality". A statement in which he included himself. Certainly this is the most important book written about Camus, by one who knows best.

Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1960

ISBN: 0679764011

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1960

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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Quotes from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

Albert Camus ·  288 pages

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“I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom's duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation. ” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yeild nothing on the plane of freedom” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“What is there more real, for instance, in our universe than a man's life, and how can we hope to preserve it better than a realistic film? But under what conditions is such a film possible? Under purely imaginary conditions. We should have to presuppose, in fact, an ideal camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move. The very projection of such a film would last a lifetime and could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else's life in great detail. Even under such conditions, such an unimaginable film would not be realistic for the simple reason that the reality of a man's life is not limited to the spot in which he happens to be. It lies also in other lives that give shape to his--lives of people he loves, to begin with, which would have to be filmed too, and also lives of unknown people, influential and insignificant, fellow citizens, policemen, professors, invisible comrades from the mines and foundries, diplomats and dictators, religious reformers, artists who create myths that are decisive for out conduct--humble representatives, in short, of the sovereign chance that dominates the most routine existences. Consequently, there is but one possible realistic film: one that is constantly shown us by an invisible camera on the world's screen. The only realistic artist, then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world. I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I regret having to play the role of Cassandra once more and having to disappoint the fresh hopes of certain ever hopeful colleagues, but there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“The moment of despair is alone, pure, sure of itself, pitiless in its consequences. It has a merciless power.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Despite men's suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated with their fate.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“short, all flee real responsibility, the effort of being consistent or of having an opinion of one’s own, in order to take refuge in the parties or groups that will think for them, express their anger for them, and make their plans for them. Contemporary intelligence seems to measure the truth of doctrines and causes solely by the number of armored divisions that each can put into the field. Thenceforth everything is good that justifies the slaughter of freedom, whether it be the nation, the people, or the grandeur of the State. The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Men like you and me who in the morning patted children on the head would a few hours later become meticulous executioners.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“…A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one’s life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages—most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless—on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men. No,” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.” ― Albert Camus, quote from Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

About the author

Albert Camus Born place: in Mondovi, Algeria Born date November 7, 1913 See more on GoodReads

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Resistance, rebellion, and death

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