128 Quotes by Jacques Derrida

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

Beauty only happens once.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

The only attitude (the only politics--judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning.

We are all mediators, translators.

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.

Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.