“Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.”

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), p. 18.

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Alain Finkielkraut4

French essayist, born 1949 1949

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