My name is Jean-Paul Sartre. Students in tonight's audience may be too young to remember me, but you of middle years will recall that I caused great controversy in the era after World War II, and was the target of many denunciations. Existence is all there is, and we must look at it with the clinical eye of the scientist. Human behavior is a bizarre jumble of affection and hostility, greed and generosity, violence and gentleness. The world abounds with love, and with horror.
People are capable of terrible cruelties to each other.
Hell is other people,'' is a key line in one of my plays. Meanwhile, random luck governs much of life. By sheer accident, some are privileged Americans and some are starving Ethiopians. There is no Grand Order of life. There is no God putting people on Earth as a testing place, consigning the wicked to hell and the righteous to heaven.