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Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.

— J. M. Coetzee

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Funny

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars.

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But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?

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He is here, with her, out of love. *He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.”

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Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?

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She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.

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Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.

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A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

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The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel– a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

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Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: J. M. Coetzee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.