“Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.”

— George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 2 (p. 61).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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George Steiner 74

American writer 1929–2020

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