Derrida Quotes

“The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.”
― Jacques Derrida

“I have forgotten my umbrella.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say," He says so and so, "he always says," You misunderstood me. "But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method ofobscurantisme terroriste(terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.' That’s the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.”
― John R. Searle

“The assumption thatDerridaalways knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?”
― David Markson

“The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“We work side by side, and some of us imagine that because we are equal under the law, we are also the same. We are and should be equal under the law. But we are not the same - despite what some activists and politicians, journalists and academics would have us believe.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool's game.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern" gender ideology "is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Our bodies are rich sources of evidence about sexual selection pressures because they are visible, measurable, easily comparable with those of other species, and relatively undistorted by human culture. In recent years much nonsense has been written by post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault about the" social construction of the body ", as if human bodies were the incarnation of cultural norms rather than ancestral sexual preferences.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“It is no accident that, in every human culture known, there is language that distinguishes male from female. It's a human universal.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as -radical skepticism-. It says, -all knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way-. Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn't true. Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative -a sweeping explanation of how things work- and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Progress ocurred fastest of all in the 1960 and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all ocurred before postmodernism became influential. Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies -in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress ocurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Almost every social significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, it spread, leaping the species gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of" the greater good ".”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Derrida remarked that friendship's driver isn't the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would" choose knowing rather than being known. "I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Logocentrism, in Jacques Derrida's understanding, is the assumption that language has a stable center, guaranteeing communication and representation of the world, which would privilege the word as a source of meaning and authority, implying the assumption of an objective truth and restricted to the signifier. This results in a hierarchization of knowledge, exclusion of alternative perspectives and a simplistic dichotomy of reality. To break with this, we need to promote the appreciation of linguistic diversity, explore different forms of knowledge, challenge structures of linguistic power and adopt a critical stance in relation to language.”
― Geverson Ampolini