Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.