Paul C > Paul's Quotes

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

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

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

“Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!”
― Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce