I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

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.

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

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.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

You are not honored for the fruit you pick, but for the trees you plant.

We say the rarajipari is the game of life, Angel said. You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can't control it. You can only adjust.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

I only go to mass when somebody asks me, but when I get in trouble I call for a priest.

The writers are so smart, I can only imagine. I would love to be in that room. I love the creative process.

First, there must be talent. . .Then there must be discipline. . .Then there must be. . .and absolute conscience. . .to prevent faking.

Be able to confide your innermost secrets to your mother and your innermost fears to your father.

If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world.

Awash in a flood of hostility and despair, they battled and railed and shattered their bodies on one another, unable to find one strand, one sobering swallow of solace.