Desperation tempts me again: the idea that this will never end, that there is no goal, that there are only small particular goals for which we fight. Small revolutions are made, but there is no human end, there is nothing that interests man, there are only disorders. It is possible to think something like that. That thought tempts you incessantly, especially when you're old and you can think: well, anyway, I'm going to die in five years at the most — actually I think in ten years, but it could well be five. In either case, the world seems ugly, bad, and hopeless. That is the quiet despair of an old man who will die within him. But precisely I resist and I know that I will die in hope, but this hope must be founded.

We must try to explain why the world today, which is horrible, is only a moment in the long historical development, that hope has always been one of the dominant forces of revolutions and insurrections, and explain how I still feel the hope as my conception of the future.

Jean Paul Sartre