Jean Genet Quotes

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.

Metallica is a very complicated, fragile thing. On the outside, it's all metal, but on the inside it's very delicate.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

Most women have small waists the world throughout, But their desires are thousand miles about.

Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.

We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.

So much good, so much evil. Just add water.

I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.

Man is the cruelest animal.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

Ares ever loves to pluck all the fairest flower of an armed host.

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man. We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind. And that isn't right, your Reverence. The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people.

Beasts kill for hunger, men for pay.