Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.
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Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.
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Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity -- a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.
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There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.
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Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
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Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat
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I didn't realize you were an art collector. I thought you just collected corpses. I'll bet you paid plenty for this little piece of sculpture....
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The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.
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Roger Thornhill: Has life been like that? Eve Kendall: Uhm mm....
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She went over to the mirror...glancing at herself sidelong, as women do who think they have lost their beauty; repudiating a complete reflection.
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There is a deep fundamental dysfunction in the way we gather intelligence...
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The three of you together. Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw.
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