Quotes by Cultural Critics

Prose divides shame into stations.

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.

The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

History is written by the victors.

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.

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,Showed me the high, white star of Truth,There bade me gaze, and there aspire.Even now their whispers pierce the gloom'What dost thou in this living tomb?

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.