Stanley Fish

“It is not that the presence of consensus is a sign of legitimacy, but that consensus is the substance of legitimacy.”

“A fact is a fact only in the context of some background assumptions.”

“Every reference to justice is an argument, not a report.”

“Neutrality is a dream of those who have already taken a side.”

“Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.”

“The reader's response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning.”

“In the academy, you don't get points for making your work accessible. You get points for making it dense and obscure.”

“To be a person is to be a partisan.”

“Principles don't constrain you. Your commitments to them constrain you.”

“There's no such thing as free speech, and it's a good thing, too.”

“The problem with 'the truth' is that it's a conversation-stopper.”

“Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.”

“The first step in any interpretive activity is to realize that you are always already in a situation.”

“The law is a profession of words.”

“We are never without guides, only without the guide we would like to have, the one that is not a guide at all but a guarantee.”

“What is at stake are not contestable assertions but the very terms of contestation.”

“The self is a text, and it is a text that is constantly being rewritten.”

“Beliefs are not odd little quirks of the mind; they are the matrices of our lives.”