Jacques Derrida Quotes

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

Plato was a bore.

I cannot comprehend fundamentalism. It's fundamentally wrong.

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

Sometimes you have trouble because someone 'likes' your music so much. They follow you around for hours singing little bits of the songs, or just freaking out.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

I had preconceived notions going in and it was even stranger than I thought it would be …. It is a total cult of personality.

… a cult

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

The definition of a fanatic is a man who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten the purpose of his struggle.

They [philosophers] conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

I was obsessed with Lil' Bow Wow growing up, and you couldn't see the white of my walls because they were plastered with his photos. This is even more embarrassing: I had a notebook full of facts about Bow Wow and different pictures. I basically made a biography notebook about him and his life when he was, like, 13.

I buy a lot of Liverpool trinkets. I've got Philippe Coutinho's boot - I spent three grand on that. Which, you know, is insane. But it's Philippe Coutinho's boot, what you gonna do?

Anything I do, I do fanatically.

Anything that I love, I love to the extreme. I'm obsessive. If it's 'Star Wars,' if it's 'Transformers,' if it's the Flyers, I geek out.

The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.

Please. They're like the Cult of Four.

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

For comic writers charge Socrates with making the worse appear the better reason.

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.