Deconstructionism Quotes

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”
― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

“Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.”
― Stuart Hall

“There are lots of things I don't understand - say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. -- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest -- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.”
― Noam Chomsky

“So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“That America is an exceptional nation is unclear only to one who has not been taught its true history. It ceases to be exceptional only when its representative leaders cease to be exceptional. America, it has been said, is a nation of laws, not of men. The more it becomes a nation of men, the less it remains America.”
― Ron Brackin

“Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool's game.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“A marker of healing from religious trauma is not simply the process of deconstructing one’s worldview and identity and rebuilding a new one; it is also the willingness to remain open to shifting and changing over the course of one’s life.”
― Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion

“This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Deconstruction is a journey of discovery, and some of the most important revelations are about our very selves. Let’s keep learning new things, and growing into more."

Suzanne DeWitt Hall”
― Suzanne DeWitt Hall

“While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern "gender ideology" is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“La lectura, para los deconstructivos, es una tarea infinita y no se entiene que tengan necesidad de más de un libro.
(Diccionario de las artes)”
― Félix de Azúa, Dizionario delle arti

“Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously—often, in fact, there above all—there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have been held, explicitly or (more often) implicitly within various circles, and which have often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically. The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelists, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellow in the world of literary epistemology.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“It is no accident that, in every human culture known, there is language that distinguishes male from female. It's a human universal.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life