Timothy Morton

“I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.”

“Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.”

“Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.”

“An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.”

“If you're applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.”

“Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?”

“I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I'm going to pour it everywhere.”

“Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?”

“OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.”

“Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.”

“Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.”

“Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.”

“After a lifetime of listening to every Floyd album pretty much all the time - they're etched - 'Animals' is the one I can listen to again and again.”

“We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.”

“'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'”

“Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You've been involved in the most introverted process you've ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.”

“You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.”

“'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.”

“It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.”

“'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.”