Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Meaning of the quote

Politics is like a science, where you can use facts and arguments to show that your ideas are correct and that other people's ideas are wrong. Just like in science, you can use evidence and reasoning to convince others that your political views are the right ones.

About Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a renowned French philosopher, playwright, and political activist who made significant contributions to 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. He was known for his work on existentialism and phenomenology, and his open relationship with fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Despite being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sartre declined the honor, believing that writers should not be turned into institutions.

More about the author

More quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Acting is happy agony.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

We do not judge the people we love.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Words are loaded pistols.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total… because it may well involve the whole world.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

French existentialist philosopher (1905-1980)