It’s that time of year again! Your eight- to ten-page papers are due, and it’s time to pack them chock full of quotes that say in four lines or more what you want to say, but better (and longer). Here are the block quotes you actually have to add to your paper or else you are totally screwed.
Sigmund Freud on Vice:
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies. We cannot dispense with auxiliary constructions, as Theodor Fontane said. There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratification, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.
No college paper is complete with Sigmund Freud is what it seems like. This quote is both an intertextual examination of coping mechanisms for this crazy thing called life and six lines long! Nicely chosen!
Karl Marx on Production:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
This section of The Communist Manifesto is perfect for any essay on the economy, political movements, history, marketing, or wherever you want to stick this thing! It’s smart and controversial and over four lines. A+.
Immanuel Kant on Good Will
A good will is good not because of what it effects, or accomplishes, not because of its fitness to attain some intended end, but good just by its willing, i.e. in itself; and, considered by itself, it is to be esteemed beyond compare much higher than anything that could ever be brought about by it in favor of some inclinations, and indeed, if you will, the sum of all inclinations. Even if by some particular disfavor of fate, or by the scanty endowment of a stepmotherly nature, this will should entirely lack the capacity to carry through its purpose; if despite its greatest striving it should still accomplish nothing, and only the good will were to remain (not of course, as a mere wish, but as the summoning of all means that are within our control); then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has full worth in itself.
No ethics essay is complete without a solid chunk of the categorical imperative shining moral light on a full half of a page. It’s not lazy if it’s sort of relevant!
Judith Butler On Gender Identity
Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
This quote from Judith Butler is an apt, lengthy commentary on the performative nature of gender, which works for any women’s or queer studies essay. You’re so smart, and already onto your fourth page. Who said academia was inaccessible?
Charles Darwin On The Grandeur Of Evolution
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
This lovely excerpt from Darwin’s On The Origin of Species is about life itself, so it’s not not relevant to your paper, whatever it’s on. If there are alive people or things involved, this quote is a nice way to go big picture enough to distract from the fact that you are bullshitting hard. It will bring a tear to your prof’s eye, as well as five lines to your paper. You were always the smartypants of your family!
You’re almost there! All you need to do is cite your sources and make your punctuation six points larger. If your margins don’t look like a staircase by now, you probably already finished your paper a week ago. Congrats, showoff!
