“Existence is prior to essence.”

“Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.”

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'Haven't you ever been in love, then?'When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'What the hell does that mean?'We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”

“As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe the possibility exists.”

“Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”