In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century...

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real?...

It is up to the individual to ‘choose’ their repertoire of the self. If they do not have access to the range of narratives and discourses for the production of the ethical self they may...

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination.

Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the Now…this” mode of discourse in it’s boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented...

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me...

Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company – and so talk goes out through the lips.

The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by ‘better’ such things as more...

Don’t bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING…. The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely...

Volatility in the up direction is not a problem-it’s only downward volatility that offers discourse.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through...

Author describes one monarch’s impressive table but conveys a contemporary’s observation, “the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation”.

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was...

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which for forty years he [Joseph Black] performed this useful and dignified office. His style of lecturing was as nearly perfect as can well be conceived;...

We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that...

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t...

Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and...

[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele r nduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie,...

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it...

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

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.