When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

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

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.