The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
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 most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
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.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is ‘pointing towards’ some object.
Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.