People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
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.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence – one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.
The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Americans use the word ‘dream’ as often as psychoanalysts do.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.