R.E. Butler Quotes

It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.

The question is whether NGOs that bring protection or aid or reparation therapies are furthering the possibility of self-determination or extending a form of managerial power and paternalism.

The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.

I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.

I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.

People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.

If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.

I do situate myself in this problem of being a Jew who doesn't want to be represented by the state of Israel, a state that claims to represent all Jewish people and make me into a potential citizen.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.

It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

If we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves.

I think it's important to live with a certain danger and a certain risk.

A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

If you realize too acutely how valuable time is, you are too paralyzed to do anything.

I don't think people ever were free of fear of death, but clinging to life and being so unprepared for it is a modern experience.

Three-quarters of people say they want to die at home, but only a quarter of people actually do.

Attempting to grapple with improving end-of-life care is a political third rail.

Almost anyone you talk to will say, 'I don't want to die plugged into machines.

I think it's very interesting that [doctors] privilege the self that is saying, "I don't want to die," but want to discount the self that said, "I want to allow natural death in such a situation."

I've heard doctors say that before the crisis hits, people don't want prolonged measures, but then in the middle of the crisis they want everything.

I want to break the taboo against questioning this drive for maximum longevity.

Very few of us are succeeding in giving our parents the ideal death.

I want people to suffer less, and I think it's possible.

Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.

There's no narcotic like exhaustion.

To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living

He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.

In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.

I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

Souls! When have you seen your own soul - that you're so certain you have one?

I lost an arm on my last trip home.

Belief initiates and guides action - or it does nothing.

The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,...an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.

The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.

The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn't find anything to complain about.

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn't vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.