Quotes from Stanley Fish

What is a sentence, anyway?

Wij hebben geen onvervreemdbaar en 'natuurlijk' recht op het vrije woord. Elke samenleving zal bepaalde uitingen pornografisch of opruiend achten en taboe verklaren. De betekenis van zowel 'vrij' als 'woord' wordt doorlopend aangepast om aan de behoeften van de gemeenschap tegemoet te komen.

It is often said that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in a literal sense - the world is one thing, words another - but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.