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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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