Richard Rorty Quotes

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community for example, another country or historical period ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.

I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change,

I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [ ... ]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science ... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.