Butler, Judith

"Ethics cannot be codified; it requires improvisation."

"The encounter with alterity is what opens us to ethics."

"We must learn to live with what we cannot fully know or understand."

"The other exceeds our attempt to comprehend them."

"Language fails before the other, and that failure is necessary."

"To speak for the other is to deny their voice."

"Politics begins when we acknowledge that our interests are not our own."

"The social bond is not something we choose but something we inherit."

"We are always already embedded in networks of dependency and obligation."

"Freedom is not the absence of constraint but a way of being constrained."

"The law both enables and constrains our possibilities."

"Justice requires that we attend to what exceeds legal frameworks."

"The human is not a stable category but is constantly being contested."

"To be human is to be dependent on others for recognition."

"The question of who deserves protection is a political one."

"Some lives are treated as disposable, and that is a political decision."

"To make a life livable requires attending to its material conditions."

"We are responsible for more than we can account for."

"Responsibility comes before freedom, not after it."

"To be responsible is to be bound to the other without knowing how to respond adequately."

"The impossible is what we must nonetheless attempt."

"Ethics is what remains when politics fails."

"The undoing of the subject is what opens the possibility of ethical relation."

"To lose oneself is sometimes necessary for meeting the other."

"The self is not a possession but an ongoing process of becoming."

"Identity is not something we have but something we do."

"To perform identity is to be caught in the constraints of norm and convention."

"Resistance is possible within the structures that constrain us, but it is never complete."

"The political is always already ethical, and the ethical is always already political."

"To live together we must learn to live with what we do not understand."