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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm not personally fearful, but I look out, and there are a number of things that concern me, and I'm hopeful that we can overcome them.

Four inch nails is more like it!

The reprisal against the suicide bomber does not bring peace. There is a suicide bomber, a reprisal and then a counter-reprisal. And it just goes on and on.

I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in gym class failures. And I discovered instead... that I'd finally found my sport.

I wish people would take more care of the countryside.

Prizes aren't essential. What is essential is poetry itself, it's what is said, it is clarity, it's loyalty, those are the essential values, the literary values.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.