arcademole > arcademole's Quotes

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am.)”
― René Descartes

“Doubt is the origin of wisdom”
― Rene Descartes

“I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen”
― Rene Descartes, The Principles Of Philosophy

“Masked, I advance.”
― Rene Descartes

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”
― Immanuel Kant

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”
― Immanuel Kant

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.”
― Immanuel Kant

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”
― Bertrand Russell

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”
― Michel Foucault

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
― Michel Foucault

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."

[Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek, Harper's Magazine, November 11, 2011]”
― Slavoj Žižek