Derrida, Jacques

"Forgiveness must be beyond all calculation and economy."

"The margin is where meaning begins to slip."

"To decide is always to risk, to take a leap beyond knowledge."

"Authenticity is a fiction we must learn to live with."

"The specter of what never was continues to haunt the present."

"Language always arrives too late to capture presence itself."

"We are condemned to interpret endlessly, without final ground."

"The future remains radically open, untotalizable."

"To be responsible is to respond to what cannot be anticipated."

"The gift annihilates itself the moment it is recognized as a gift."

"Silence speaks louder when we understand what cannot be said."

"Power operates most effectively when it remains invisible."

"The institution is always already deconstructed from within."

"Difference is constitutive, not derivative—we are always already divided."

"Ethics begins where knowledge fails us."

"The concept carries within it the seeds of its own undoing."

"Memory is haunted by what it cannot retain."

"The law must suspend itself to be just."

"We write to preserve what escapes preservation."

"The name both reveals and conceals what it names."

"To listen is to expose oneself to disruption."

"The boundary between nature and culture dissolves under scrutiny."

"Democracy is always to come, never fully present."

"The text exceeds every intention of its author."

"Being is not a presence but a play of differences."

"The unconscious of language speaks through what we mean to say."

"Truth requires us to bear witness to the impossible."

"The other cannot be reduced to the same without violence."

"Our responsibility exceeds what we can ever fully account for."

"The flesh bears the mark of what cannot be erased."