“My view is that knowing languages is part of the process of becoming a cultured person.”

“Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.”

“If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don't want to be. ”

“Learning another language is like becoming another person.”

“culture comes into play at precisely the point where biological individuals become subjects, and that what lies between the two is not some automatically constituted ‘natural’ process of socialization but much more complex processes of formation”

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”