# Quote — Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

> If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

- Author: [Simone Weil](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil.md)
- Book: [Simone Weil: An Anthology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology.md)
- Page: 69
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simone_Weil#Human_Personality_(1943)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/if-a-captive

## More from this book

> But if Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

p. 124 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/but-if-germany.md)

> A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/a-pharisee-is-someone.md)

> The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.

p. 141 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/the-common-run.md)