top of page
.png){kind=small}
All Quotes Collection
"Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion."
37
"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron."
39
"If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit."
42
"In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."
43
"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."
43
"Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies."
49
"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem."
36
"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."
38
"Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change."
39
"I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say."
85
"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist."
70
"Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems."
35
"Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin."
48
"All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is."
48
"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."
37
"What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era."
41
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
33
"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective."
35
"The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent."
43
"The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic."
41
"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude."
46
"You don't make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you're-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don't know what's going to happen."
41
"We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city."
45
"We have to get control of our borders. You can only do that if you make companies obey the law and not hire undocumented or illegals. They can only do that is if they have a Social Security Card that has biometrics so they know whether the person is legal or not."
69
"We will rebuild, renew and remain the capital of the free world."
37
"We've shown the world that New York can never be defeated, because of its dynamic and diverse population and because it embodies the spirit of enterprise and the love of liberty."
38
"Well, we have to provide the world's best schools. We certainly don't have them, but that's our objective."
42
"When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society."
37
"You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world."
40
"This is the city of dreamers and time and again it's the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed."
46
"You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country's success."
54
"You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China."
43
"Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need."
38
"I've got the greatest job in the world. There's no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people's lives. It's a great challenge."
41
"We are the safest large city in America, but any crime rate is too high."
56
"I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that's one of the things that he's going to have to find a way to get on the agenda."
Debt,
50
"No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City."
34
"Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them so they're a necessary evil."
43
"The cold harsh reality is that we have to balance the budget."
58
"The public is mad, frustrated, but what the public wants is progress."
44
"The public is upset. If they haven't lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven't lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something's wrong, it's government's job to fix it, it must be government that's responsible for causing it."
47
"These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it's so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run."
45
bottom of page