I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.
Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.
[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.
No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.
Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.
It is easier to study the 'behavior' of rats than people, because rats are smaller and have fewer outside commitments. So modern psychology is mostly about rats
America was born out of a desire for self-determination, a longing for the human dignity that only independence can bring.