“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.”

Emmanuel Levinas

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.“

Angela Davis

Masked Racism

“To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Truth and Method

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exists.”

Hannah Arendt

Origins of Totalitarianism

“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man… The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a ‘biological’ need.”

Herbert Marcuse

One-Dimensional Man

Anyone who wished to escape this contingency of historical encounters and stand apart from the game in the name of a non-situated ‘objectivity’ would at most know everything, but understand nothing.

Paul Ricœur

The Symbolism of Evil

“When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence. Whether that is what he desires is immaterial; that he can do it is what matters.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable… And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks

“Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.“

Martin Heidegger

Letter on Humanism

“The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.”

Jacques Derrida

Of Grammatology

“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.”

Simone Weil

Gravity and Grace

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-Reliance