Levinas, Emmanuel

"To be accountable is to be awakened by the other."

"The stranger's face is the place where ethics begins."

"Alterity cannot be integrated into a system without violence."

"The other demands my absolute responsiveness."

"Freedom is not autonomy but the ability to respond to the other."

"The face speaks without words and cannot be ignored."

"To be ethical is to be haunted by the other's absence."

"Justice emerges from the encounter with the other's radical difference."

"Being is disrupted by the ethical relation with the other."

"The infinite is not a concept but an ethical orientation."

"Responsibility binds me to the other even unto death."

"The other is not known through cognition; the other is my responsibility before being my knowledge."

"Ethics is not a regional experience that completes a prior and fundamental ontology; ethics is first philosophy."

"To be human is to be summoned by the face of the other."

"The infinite enters into relationship with the finite without compromising its infinity."

"Responsibility is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the subject were initially a substance that could have it or not."

"The face of the other speaks to me without intermediary; it is language itself."

"Justice begins when I recognize my obligation to the stranger, the widow, and the orphan."

"We are in a time of profound ethical crisis disguised as freedom."

"The alterity of the other cannot be reduced to my categories of understanding."

"To love is to love the vulnerability of the beloved."

"Transcendence means the other is radically other, infinitely distant."

"Language is not first communication; it is ethical responsibility."

"The human subject is not a sovereign consciousness; it is vulnerability."

"Hospitality is the welcome of the wholly other."

"I am responsible for the other even before understanding myself."

"The trace of infinity is found in the ethical relation with the other."

"Murder begins in the denial of the other's face."

"Consciousness is awakened by the call of the other's suffering."

"To be free is to be able to say 'no' to the violence of totality."