I have to think like an existentialist.

Simone de Beauvoir, whose seminal bookThe Second Sex laid the groundwork for post war Western feminism, was an Existentialist who was neither a wife nor a mother nor a woman of faith.

I always dreamt that, when I had my final breakdown, it would be because I had a deep Kafkaesque existentialist revelation, or that maybe Cate Blanchett would play me and she would win an Oscar for it.

Such was the existentialist worldview of US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Theodore Roosevelt, a major advocate of American expansionism A just war is, in the long run, far better for a man s soul than the most prosperous peace.