Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:
"History is nothing but a series of blunders, confused situations, indecision among the strong, audacity among the weak, until historians come along and put it all in order."
"The army which launches a revolution must almost immediately be liquidated and replaced by another which will defend this revolution against the original revolutionaries."
"In Algeria the army, in order to win or convince, had gone so far as to use the same methods as the inquisitors and the commissars. But, because it had scruples it had not reduced torture to a system, nor displayed the discretion which must surround this sort of practice and which at the same time confers on it an almost sacred horror."
"We're waging a stupid kind of war, to the point of forgetting that a rebel who's come over to our side is worth ten dead."
"Forget everything you've been told.
In this war you do the opposite of what the rules lay down; in fact you
only learn the rules in order to do the opposite."
"We have crushed ancient civilizations underfoot, but we, the French, have had the hypocrisy to pretend that we were trying to defend them… those camels slaughtered in the middle of the dunes!"
"Love has a smell, the smell of a couple's sweat and of their pleasure. It is made up of the tussle between man and woman - an endless, cruel tussle, because each wants to impose his dream on the other and to destroy the dream that is not his own."
"I no longer believe in anything else but friendship - the friendship of men. Out of our incoherent life, out of all our useless fighting in Indo-China and Algeria, all we have left is friendship."