The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Soon after the event on 6 August 1945 he was one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States' dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. To distinguish his ideas scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd when referring to "Camus's Absurd".

In an interview in 1945 Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. In 1949 Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement after his split with Garry Davis's Citizens of the World movement of which the surrealist André Breton was also a member.