Quotes from Wendy Brown

This effort [to establish racism, sexism and homophobia as morally heinous in law] also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors.

Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands, the heavy price of institutionalised protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules

The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation.

Tolerated individuals will always be those who deviate from the norm, never those who uphold it, but they will also be further articulated as (deviant) individuals through the very discourse of tolerance.

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, "culture" is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts

Tolerance also requires a public acceptance of beliefs and values at odds with our own, beliefs and values that we may consider wrongheaded and even immoral. ... In this context, a morally passionate citizen becomes strangely intolerable.

Only recently has tolerance become an emblem of Western civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West's savagely intolerant history, which includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burnings, centuries of anti-Semitism, slavery, lynching, genocidal and other violent practices of imperialism and colonialism, Naziism, and brutal responses to decolonization.

If tolerance poses as a middle road between rejection on the one side and assimilation on the other, this road, as already suggested, is paved by necessity rather than virtue; tolerance, as Nietzsche would say, becomes a virtue only retroactively and retrospectively.

formal political life is a theater of nihilism: the political sphere is where nihilism is played out in raw form and also a site for overcoming or pushing back against nihilism through pursuit of worldly causes. In our time, both potentials are there, and routinely collide.

There's nothing more worth doing than trying to be a human in an increasingly dehumanized world.