Избегать контактов с любым существом, в котором не чувствуется никакого возможного отклика на то, что вас глубоко затрагивает и по отношению к которому у вас есть обязательства "учтивости", вежливости. Поскольку пресловутые обязательства меня чрезвычайно сковывают, как только я оказываюсь в присутствии подобных существ, сковывают пагубной привычкой к терпению и благожелательности, становящимся на деле готовностью к унижению (порой отвратительному), представьте, что музыкант в оркестре из учтивости вторит соседу, который играет фальшиво.

- Сакральное (фрагмент из тетради 1937 г.), Жорж Батай, Колетт Пеньо (Лаура)

LET'S START with these two basic questions.
I'll begin with the second because it's easier to answer.

We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.
If someone knows how to play the violin only a little, he will find that the painful minutes he causes are not in proportion to the possible joy he gains from his playing. The amateur chemist spares himself ridicule only as long as he doesn’t aspire for professional laurels. The man somewhat skilled in medicine will not go far, and if he tries to trade on his knowledge without certification, he will be locked up as a quack doctor.

Solely in the world of languages is the amateur of value. Well-intentioned sentences full of mistakes can still build bridges between people. Asking in broken Italian which train we are supposed to board at the Venice railway station is far from useless. Indeed, it is better to do that than to remain uncertain and silent and end up back in Budapest rather than in Milan.

- Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, Kató Lomb

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.

- On Lies and Feminism, Adrienne Rich