The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

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.

There's life outside Backstreet Boys that is going on and continuing.

Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.

To know the hight [sic] of a mountain, one must climb it.

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

There is no later. This is later.

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.

No hair so small but hath his shadow.

A perfect peace is not possible; it doesn't exist.

I might be old, but I'm still desirable.

The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.