"All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears."

"Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conj…"

"I always had this feeling — I’ve heard other Jews say — that when you can’t find any other explanation for Jews, you say, “Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme r…"

"The ancient theory of heroic genealogy... reflects paternity at two levels: human and divine. A man's inheritance comes from his human father, but his qualitative superiority among mortals comes from …"

"Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to wo…"