Discourse Quotes

“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? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“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 opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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 says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“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 never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.”
― David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

“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 miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.”
― Vera Nazarian

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

“My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.”
― Hermes Trismegistus

“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.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“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 imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“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.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.”
― Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text

“We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.”
― Rae Armantrout

“The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
― Leslie Lamport

“Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“I would rather drift aimlessly on the turbulent stream of idle discourse than be even in the vicinity of nauseous, turbid effluent of ideological disquisition.”
― R. N. Prasher

“...You, my friend, are society. So welcome to the club of community, and even though some may try to drown out other styles of discourse with shouts about personal rights, the community may have a thing or two to say, and it may say it a lot louder. After all, community can only progress when its individuals exercise higher moral choices, and community is sacrificed when individuals choose with only themselves in mind.”
― Joni Eareckson Tada, When Is It Right to Die?: A Comforting and Surprising Look at Death and Dying

“It was very learned, but it didn't actually say anything.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences (‘this stands for that’), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“The focus on lived experience by identity groups valorizes inner selves experienced emotionally rather than examined rationally. Notes one observer, “Our political culture is marked, at the micro level, by the fusion of a given person’s opinion and what they perceive to be their singular, permanent, and authentic self.” This privileges opinions sincerely held over reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon those opinions. That an argument is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as sufficient to delegitimize it, a trend encouraged by the kind of short-form discourse propagated by social media.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“A surprising number of people believe that other people can hurt their feelings.”
― Vincent P. Collins, Acceptance

“...if there be some points which correspondence can never settle, but which can be made clear by conversation in two minutes, at other times just the opposite is the case: an objection clearly stated in writing, a doubt well expressed, which elicits a direct and positive reply, helps things along more than ten hours of oral intercourse!”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?

“In order to dismantle such a discourse we must begin with the realization that desire is never “outside all social constraint.” Desire may be outside one set of constraints or another; but social constraints are what engender desire; and, one way or another, even at its most apparently catastrophic, they contour desire’s expression.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

“Lost in the incessant focus on the darker sides of free speech—real, perceived, and exaggerated—are the profound benefits of free and open discourse, from the toppling of absolutist rulers to the cross-fertilization of knowledge across cultures and the defeat of institutional racism and discrimination. As thinkers like Spinoza, Cato, Madison, Constant, and Douglass have pointed out, we jeopardize those benefits if we are unwilling to accept any of the harms or costs that inevitably accompany free expression.”
― Jacob Mchangama, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

“the anti-political correctness types are really just trying to enforce their own standards of acceptable discourse and are furious at their inability to do so

(6/5/2020 on Twitter)”
― Adam Serwer

“Designed for instant impact and encouraging feelings of omnipotence, Twitter is the perfect tool for an impulsive, attention-addicted strongman.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol [of] insubordination and [of a] valuable property that needed to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.

The question of European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure − when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations.

Contemporary records reveal that this was happening [during] a period of social and political uncertainty, and that the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“The discourse around the practice of dowry intertwined the individual rights of women within the paradox of patrilocality, a woman’s traditional position and role with her natal and matrimonial family, and the privileged position of men within the institution of marriage. Women are being considered as the `valiant keepers of the tradition’ of marriage, how violent it is, rather than as humans or citizens endowed with political rights. The discourse also ignored the tensions between women as individuals, as citizens, and women as daughters, wives, and daughters-in-law. Upholding patriarchy and not women’s emancipation remains the goal of such socio-legal debate.”
― Shalu Nigam