After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
… Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism….
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers’ instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them.
The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.