“An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you”

“Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”

“...and my signature is drawn in magic markeron the lower right hand corner of the windowso when something passes in the darkit's captured for a moment inside my work.”

“Biologically speaking, if something bites you, it is more likely to be female.”

“If you do not have the possibility of abandoning your religion, you do not enjoy the possibility of freely embracing it, either.”

“In order to generate ideological paradigms sufficient to explain the demands for military sacrifice, intellectuals rearticulate the cultural project: the battle for culture becomes the battle for the people’s culture which in turn endows participation in the war effort with a democratic appearance. The de facto defense of the empire and imperialism is inverted, by the magic of culture, into a defense of the people.”

“Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least once”