Quotes from Donald Phillip Verene

The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state.

The media is the thought-form of the technological society, and it finds nothing it does to be laughable, a sure sign that it is not human.

Vico's terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce's ''two thinks at a time'' (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico's meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

We may say that morality, as well as good sense, is the best distributed thing in the world, for all think themselves so well endowed with both that even those who are hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of them than they possess.