Simon Critchley Quotes

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.

It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility.

I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don't see philosophy as an academic enterprise.

Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and also by nonhuman beings.

The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.

Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.

Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible.

In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope.

Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.

Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.

I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.

Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.

There are lots of stories about how philosophy begins. Some people claim it begins in wonder; some people claim it begins in worry. I claim it begins in disappointment.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.

My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.