Bernard Williams Quotes

The idea that this end of philosophy - at least, of political philosophy and (I claim) moral philosophy - has close relations with history overlaps with a more ambitious view held by a consistently underestimated Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. The trouble with Collingwood's kind of commitment is that it requires one to know some history. My two associates in the view I am sketching are Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. They are both Roman Catholics, though of different sorts. I used to find this a disquieting fact but no longer do so. All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. In any case, we all assume some historical commitments, they on a more ambitious scale than I, and perhaps there is a rather nervous competition for who writes the most irresponsible history.

Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair.

We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody's weakness.

... while transparency is a natural associate of liberalism, it falls short of implying rationalism. It is one aspiration, that social and ethical relations should not essentially rest on ignorance and misunderstanding of what they are, and quite another that all the beliefs and principles involved in them should be explicitly stated. That these are two different things is obvious with personal relations, where to hope that they do not rest on deceit and error is merely decent, but to think that their basis can be made totally explicit is idiocy.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.

The only serious enterprise is living.

An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity.

The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality's being inescapably pure, but from religion's being incurably unintelligible.

This is the end of the day, but soon there will be a new day.

People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.

Few things move as quietly as the future.

A half-truth is usually less than half of that.

So far I have not said much about objectivity, though earlier chapters have had a good deal to do with it. If an Archimedean point could be found and practical reason, or human interests, could be shown to involve a determinate ethical outlook, then ethical thought would be objective, in the sense that it would have been given an objective foundation. Those are possibilities - or they might have turned out to be possibilities - within the perspective of practical reason. Very often, however, discussions of objectivity come into moral philosophy from a different starting point, from an interest in comparing ethical beliefs with knowledge and claims to truth of other kinds, for instance with scientific beliefs. Here a rather different conception of objectivity is involved. It is naturally associated with such questions as what can make ethical beliefs true, and whether there is any ethical knowledge. It is in this field of comparisons that various distinctions between fact and value are located.

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a Pirate.

I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.

Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.

What will the professor's justification do, when they break down the door, smash his spectacles, take him away?

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.

Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.

That an action would be cowardly is not often found by an agent to be a consideration in its favor, but it could be, and in a counterethical way, ministering to a masochism of shame.

Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.

What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.

Utilitarians are often immensely conscientious people, who work for humanity and give up meat for the sake of the animals. They think this is what they morally ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standard. They do not, and perhaps could not, ask: How useful is it that I think and feel like this?

If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.

Tranquility is like quicksilver. The harder you grab for it, the less likely you will grasp it.

If we try and fail, we have temporary disappointments. But if we do not try at all, we have permanent regrets.