“We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called ‘contemporary philosophers’.

All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.

If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.

To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

We have the riots we deserve.

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an ‘ethics of communication’. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid.

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of ‘there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties’), thereof one must be silent.

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?

let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.

At the age of eight, I discovered that I could write songs.

I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift.

Maybe there’s more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

That’s what love does. When it’s right, it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be.

I don’t ever remember them telling us or teaching us that the only way we could be more successful is if other people were less successful. They never inculcated the belief that somehow, in order for us to climb the ladder, other people have to come down from the ladder.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.