My favourite quotes

“Analysis, while necessary, may also be an indefensible luxury” — Leo Bersani
“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself” – John Searle
“Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed” – Deleuze&Guattari
“If God does not exist, nothing is permitted any longer” – Jacques Lacan
“Power always forms the ground floor above which a free subject moves in” – Peter Sloterdjick
“Individuals could certainly not be ‘liberated’ without educating them in a certain way” – Foucault
“Art alone develops weaklings, science alone, monsters. Somewhere, somehow, we must combine the two.” – Alfred Kinsey
“There’s nothing like a death in the family to separate the wheat from the bullshit” – Francis Underwood
“Everyone feels alone, pushed to compete, at the mercy of precariousness” – Franco Berardi
“The subject gets stuck doing the same thing over and over again … Post. Post. Post. Click. Click. Click” – Jodi Dean
“The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it’s horrible.” – Franco Berardi
“If you have a good thing to sell use every single capacity you can to sell it. It is no use having it & no-one hearing” – Margaret Thatcher
“Why are you sorry? Because you’re an evil bastard with no conscience & no heart? That’s why I liked you in first place” – Tyrion Lannister
“The 21st century has often felt like the comedown after a speed binge” – Mark Fisher
“For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectations and response” – Audrey Lorde
“Those are brave men knocking at our door! Let’s go kill them” – Tyrion Lannister
“Don’t start from the good old things but from the bad new ones” – Brecht
“Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?” – mark fisher
No one is ever sure that he is truly happy; and to ask the question is already to spoil the answer.” – Pascal Bruckner
“I feel as if one would only discover on one’s death bed what one ought to have lived for” – Bertrand Russell
“What do we do now, now that we are happy?” – Samuel Beckett
“We all do ontology, it’s not an option. The only option is whether we do it explicitly and systematically or implicitly” – Tony Lawson
“The prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilisation” – Hayek
“National security aside it hardly makes any difference who will be next president. The world is governed by market forces” – Alan Greenspan
“Academics are now digitised, whether we like it or not” – Deborah Lupton
“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few” – William Morris
“Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do” – John Ruskin
“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he only had good intentions. He had money as well” – Margaret Thatcher
“I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times” – John Ruskin
“To combine austerity with growth is like squaring the circle: no one really knows how it could be done” – Wolfgang Streeck
“Every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air” – C.S. Peirce
“We are contingent temporary flotsam on a sea of being” – Roy Bhaskar
“The soul is the form of the body” – Aristotle
“It is time to realise that a passionately held intellectual conviction is passionate” – Dorothy Sayers
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” – Theodore Roosevelt
“You lie down with dogs and you get fleas” – Dianne Abbott
“Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them” – Bruno Latour
“The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face” – Cory Doctorow
“Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth” – Peter Ustinov
“Vex not thy spirit at the course of things, they heed not thy vexations” – Marcus Aurelius
“For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity” – Adorno
“The last great adventure is ME” – Tracy Emin
“The middle class male thinks he has a monopoly on objectivity.” – Grayson Perry
“The pleasures of relaxed chat, of casual conversation, encourage the ethnographer in everyone” – Richard Sennett
“We are simultaneously free and constrained and we also have some awareness of it” – Margaret Archer
“Democracy is a gleaming Excalibur – let’s not use it just to mend the toaster.” – Russell Brand
“Being a sociologist means never having to be bored” – Randall Collins
“Life does not consist of people responding to a limited number of variables” – Howard Becker
“One of the worst things that happens to Sociologists is that they become academics” – Howard Becker
“Say it how you see it, buddy, I’m a hurting hot mess. A constantly inconsistent work in progress” – Sage Francis
“An ontology without a methodology is deaf and dumb; a methodology without an ontology is blind” – Margaret Archer
“We do not live to think, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving” – José Ortega y Gasset
“I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him” – Ödön von Horváth
“It’s a terrible place. Twitter’s an awful place. Sometimes Twitter makes me want to fucking kill myself” – Earl Sweatshirt
“I am an interpreter of interpretations” – James Delingpole
“Now remember, don’t be the way you normally are and sustain that for the rest of your life” – Marge Simpson
“To read Goffman is to be seduced or to refuse seduction” – Ian Craib
“If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything” – Jacques Derrida
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” – c wright mills
“I’m interested in ways of writing about the social world that don’t assassinate the life that’s in it” – Les Back
“I am not a man, I am dynamite” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“The site on which we build is always cluttered: the past lingers in the same ‘present’ in which the future tries to take root” – Zygmunt Bauman
“My, how the Brummies love their concrete” – Chris Mullin
“Narrow souls I cannot abide; There’s almost no good or evil inside” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?” – Martin Heidegger
“A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement” – Clement Attlee
“Ideas disturb the levelness of life” – Susan Sontag
“God, living is enormous!” – Susan Sontag
“Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.” — Steve Jobs
“Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself” – Nick Land
“Now fucking pay me” – Jackie Cogan
“I’ve read enough novels to know just how much time & energy it takes to fall in love and I just don’t have the time” – Alexandra Kollontai
“Podcasting might be thought of as a form of academic gift” – Les Back
“It’s the red line! You can’t use chemicals to kill your own people. You have to do it organically” – John Stewart
“Rather than intimidating and bleak, the Barbican is as attractive and mysterious as a J.G Ballard heroine” – Owen Hatherley
“Phenomenology is a fallible guide to reality, but it can be a useful pointer” – Margaret Archer
“I may not have succeeded in halting the war, but I did secure the right of parliament to decide on war” – Robin Cook
“The NHS is safe in my hands” – David Cameron
‘The existential reality of politics is not power. it is the ever-present prospect of its loss” – Richard French
“We are little gods in the world of inner speech” – Norbert Wiley
“A street is not a street without people … it is as dead as mutton” – LS Lowry
“To be human is to exist in the tension between solitude and society” – Vincent M. Colapietro
“You cannot change the past but you can make the future. Anyone who tells you different is a fucking lethargic devil” – Immortal Technique
“Being a dick to people on Twitter isn’t activism” – Helen Lewis
“We cannot pretend that Brixton is the Bronx. Because it just isn’t” – Akala
“Real revolutionaries spend their life engaged in revolutionary acts and as cold as I am on the mic… Thus far, I just rap” – Akala
“There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.” – Goethe
“My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies” – C Wright Mills
“Theories are just disposable tools in the production of knowledge” – Manuel Castells
“It’s irresponsible of academics to keep the fruits of research up in the ivory tower” – Steven Pinker
“the mental regression of a generation elsewhere bent on reviving cupcakes” – Owen Hatherly
“Big steps often begin with small steps that slowly gather momentum” – Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin
“you’ve got to post something on Facebook or your followers will die of boredom” – overheard on train
“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.” – Iain Banks
“It’s not that society is talking about sex too much, it’s that we’re not talking about sex honestly enough” – David Jay
“Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” – Richard Rorty
“The feminists hate me, don’t they? I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.” – Thatcher
“a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus, can count himself a failure” – Thatcher (disputed)
“Do not pass universals through the sieve of history; rather strain history through a line of thought that rejects universals” – Foucault
“Nigel Farage is a less successful version of George Galloway” – Tim Farron
“This is the trouble with the public. They’re fucking horrible” – Peter Manion
“I really think this generation has been betrayed by us” – Les Back
“We wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters” – Peter Thiel
“philosophy [is] the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules’” – Richard Rorty
“obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination” – Lou Caconym
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” – Jean Cocteau
“Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.” – Bourdieu
“Mad people – people who stand alone and burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.” – Susan Sontag
“Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul” – Margaret Thatcher
“Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic” – Ambrose Bierce
“I like getting on my high horse. I look good on it. Like a knight…” – Dan Miller
“What the fuck is this!? Tinker, tailor, soldier, cunt!??” – Malcolm Tucker
“Mr Pearson, people don’t riot in Surrey. They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous…” – JG Ballard
“Enjoyment appears at boundary between boredom and anxiety, when challenges are balanced with person’s capacity to act” – M Csikszentmihalyi
“We can contemplate the creation of new kinds of vital texts: curate sociology rather than just write it” – Les Back
“man who said ‘yes, I’ll gut my kid to show my love of God’, I’d say ‘no, fuck you’” – Christopher Hitchens
“one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority” – chris hitchens
“all life is an experiment. the more experiments you make, the better” – ralph waldo emerson
“roughly one in seventy-five people on the planet is currently playing FarmVille” – Jane McGonigal
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” – Søren Kierkegaard
“A convincing social constructionist account of a broken leg has never been encountered” – Margaret Archer
“I have a visceral contempt for Blair. Not dislike. Just contempt” – Zbigniew Brzezinski
“People who talk in metaphors ought to shampoo my crotch” – Melvin Udall
“People do not read Hawking to understand quantum physics. Nobody does it. They read Hawking to get the big answers” – Žižek
“We cannot cram the embryonic world of tomorrow into yesterday’s conventional cubbyholes” – Alvin Toffler
“To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding” – George Steiner
“If you wait for the right moment, the right moment will never come. When you intervene it is always premature” – Žižek
“philosophy is more about outflanking platitudes than about making eternally true propositions” – graham harman
“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages” – C Wright Mills
“because a disaster’s a disaster no matter what christian language you drag it through” – the manchester orchestra
“I’m a man of the people, vox populi!” – Jacob Rees-Mogg
“I think you’ve got to be very careful about PR people” – Jacob Rees-Mogg
“If you’re smart and intelligent enough to make music other people like, then you’re smart and intelligent enough to sell it” – Lowkey
“If we do not communicate research effectively it may have well not be done” – Cameron Neylon
“You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that” – Samuel Beckett
“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” – Steve Jobs
“a great joy which is not the ambivalent joy of hatred, but the joy of wanting to destroy whatever mutilates life” – deleuze
“I’m an affluent person. I can keep quaffing my châteauneuf-du-pape” – Mark Littlewood
“there’s no object so Other that it can’t be anthropomorphised and shanghaied into conversation with us” – jonathan franzen
“I have tried to be objective. I do not claim to be detached” – C Wright Mills
“The complacency of the young is a counterpart of the futility of the old” – C Wright Mills
“What we ought now to do is repossess our cultural apparatus, and use it for our own purposes” – C Wright Mills
“Be nice to the people you meet on the way up because you may meet them again on the way down” – Tony Benn
“The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.” – C. Wright Mills
“Books are simply organized releases from the continuous work that goes into them” – C. Wright Mills
“There are all these choices out there for young people to make but there is no single source of normative authority” – Margaret Archer
“You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest” – Zygmunt Bauman
“it works because it’s fuckin’ word release, finally after writing it in my head and not being able to talk about it” – Sage Francis
”The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” – Gramsci
“The sunset is beautiful. It’s aesthetically appealing. It’s attractive. That doesn’t mean I want to sleep with the sun set” – Nathan Erro
“I thought teachers only went outdoors to smoke and cry” – Bart Simpson
“These are all skirmishes of something much bigger and epochal. We’re in that interregnum before the new is born and created” – Jon Cruddas
“Counting the countable because the countable can be easily counted renders impact illegitimate” – John Brewer
“Elephant and Castle is the Coventry of London” – Marta Wasik
“When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.” – George Orwell
“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.” — Dorothy Thompson
“But fuck it, let’s speak frankly, no bullshit, most of the left hates me” – Zizek
“Lethargy’s a crime” – Akala
“well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evening, About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings” – frank turner
“What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity” – Tony Giddens
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” – Walter Benjamin
“For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, of pre-eminence?” – Adam Smith
“We have the riots we deserve.” – Alain Badiou
“I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me.” – Björk
“A poem should not mean / but be” – Archibald MacLeish
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” – Mike Tyson
“I write because I read, and books have accompanied me all my life” – Kate Gross
“You know what really pisses me off about getting shot? Knowing I’m about to get shot again” – Cat Woman
“Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading” – George Monbiot
“True affluence is not needing any thing” – Gary Snyder
“That’s lying (or what the coalition might call a ‘dishonesty-based perception-changing mechanism’)” – Caroline Lucas
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing” – Raymond Williams
“Buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to create impressions that don’t last with people we don’t care about” – Tim Jackson
“The human animal’s past is constantly present in the facility with which he acts” – Mead
“Desire makes everyone its bitch” – Mckenzie Wark
“We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act” – Mark Fisher
“my ambitions far outrun my capacities” – C Wright Mills