Latest Quotes

“How does meaning occur at all? At that point one might say with Heraclitus ethos anthrēpōi daimoōn: to live authentically is to live the mystery of the thrown sustaining of meaning.”

— Thomas Sheehan, Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts

“A good girlfriend is a good listener, she reminded herself. But she was just pretending, and she knew it. In her former life, Doug used to sit across this very table and try her patience in a similar way, with long-winded soliloquies about whatever deal he happened to be working on at the moment, fi…”

— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“We have a seemingly infinite capacity for misery. Yet if the human race is cursed, it is not so much because we have been thrown into suffering and mortality, nor because we have a deeper capacity for suffering than other creatures, but rather because we take suffering and mortality to be confirmati…”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

“There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural— a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity. Anger is the best hiding place for anybody seeking to conceal…”

— Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“My intention was to give the players the freedom to figure out how to fit themselves within the system, rather than dictating from on high what I wanted them to do. Some players felt uncomfortable because they'd never been given that kind of latitude before. Others felt completely liberated.”

— Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

“The warrior ethic has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond war and warriors. I disagree with those men's movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits— like courage, teamwork, loyalty— but the archetype its…”

— Shepherd Bliss , The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Men of integrity are not ashamed to serve. They are caretakers, guardians, keepers of the flame. They know joy.”

— Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“The ability to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility.”

— Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“I was in awe of my father, and it seemed to me that I often sensed he was afraid of me. Perhaps he was intimidated by my heart that was as his used to be when he was a boy: big, full, open, strong, and tender.”

— Neale Lundgren, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“What is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. I know anger. My body contains as much anger as water. It is the material from which I have built my house: blood red bricks that cry in the rain…. It is the face and posture…”

— Joseph Beam, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology

“In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“Revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial. They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty.”

— Benito Mussolini, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

“The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

“A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary. The annihilation of the decaying races... Dominion over the earth as a means of producing the higher…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

“To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!' – that alone do I call redemption!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Since the self is inherently a fiction, the only genuine end of self-transformation is aesthetic: to perpetually overlay the groundless self with 'style' for the sake of making it ever more attractive and interesting.”

— Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

“The new philosopher can arise only in conjunction with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization. Great politics, rule over the earth, are at hand.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

“But how are we to determine what is said in the talk that belongs to this kind of discourse? What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going…”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Vocal utterance… is not essential for discourse, and therefore not for the call either; this must not be overlooked.”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Paul lived and died convinced he was a Jew living out Judaism.”

— Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity