'I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.'

'...a slave is a tool with a soul, while a tool is a slave without a soul.'

'Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.'

'…they wanna know if I claim the clique that I'm hangin with…'

2011 Pazz & Jop ballot (archived at furia.com)

'…the genuine philosophers who haunt our cities—by contrast to the fake ones—take on all sorts of different appearances just because of other people’s ignorance…'

'… the experience of reading texts which harbour such a philosophical ideal will itself be subject to the same fears and fantasies—a fear of all but inevitable expressiveness, a fantasy of all but impossible community, and a sense that there is nothing of oneself that is not given expression, and put at stake, in Wittgenstein's words, and hence in the burden of bearing their meaning even when one comes to feel that no one else could understand what they mean—either to Wittgenstein, or to this reader of Wittgenstein, the one who is at once still within the circle and aiming to inscribe a new circle outside it, through acts of reading so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention, but with the hope of their becoming the source of new conventions.'

'Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.'

'By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavour to express the intentions of my heart to persuade people to bow to my will. But I had not the power to express all that I wanted nor could I make my wishes understood by everybody.'