Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith