Jean Genet Quotes

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
Jean Genet

Great, Friendly, Away

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet

Betrayal, Nothing, Anyone

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

Time, Long, Dream

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet

Dreams, Young, Youth

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

Speak, Felt, Audience

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet

History, True, Real

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

Revolution, Object, Liberation

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
Jean Genet

Power, End, May

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

Live, Universe, Air

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Jean Genet

Success, Fame, Paid

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet

Bad, Achieve, Harmony

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
Jean Genet

Violence, Calm, Disturbs

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Jean Genet

Strange, Fact, Anyone

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet

Give, Violence, Name

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

Beauty, Deep, Traitors

I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Jean Genet

Eyes, Why, Questions

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
Jean Genet

Deep, Black, Country

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet

Hatred, Born, Ideas

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Biography

Nationality: French

Type: Dramatist

Born: December 19, 1910

Died: April 15, 1986

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Cite this Page: Citation

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