The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational.

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy.

I am particularly grateful to Nozick for his unfailing help and encouragement during the last stages.

When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them.

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

A just system must generate its own support.

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.

Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good.

Let us now consider whether justice requires the toleration of the intolerant, and if so under what conditions. There are a variety of situations in which this question arises. Some political parties in democratic states hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have the power. Again, there are those who reject intellectual freedom but who nevertheless hold positions in the university. It may appear that toleration in these cases is inconsistent with the principles of justice, or at any rate not required by them.

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

Men resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.

An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment.

An intolerant sect has no right to complain when it is denied an equal liberty. ... A person's right to complain is limited to principles he acknowledges himself.

If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.

Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome.

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.

Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

...the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

In order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak.

His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking.

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.

The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.

[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.

Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.

That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.

His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it.

Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.