Robert C. Solomon Quotes

Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.

The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85.

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments.

Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.

High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.

Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust.

We also confuse trust with familiarity.

For all of the advice in the magazines on "How to Keep your Love Alive," the salvation of love is not the prolongation of sexual desire but the shared lifelong cultivation of a romantic lightheartedness that softens conflicts and anxieties and focuses serious attention even as it undermines seriousness as such. It's hard to fall out of love so long as you're laughing together.

The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items.

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life. [Spirituality for the Skeptic]

All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.

Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible.

A woman's death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well.

If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.

We choose our friends on the basis of, among other things, our conception of ourselves. That's not to say that friendship is narcissistic, it doesn't follow that we choose people 'like ourselves'; in fact we might choose people very different than ourselves. For example, if I'm not very intelligent, and I'm concerned about my lack of intelligence, I might take up with an extremely intelligent woman, precisely in order to have her intelligence, in some sense, radiate onto me.

The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that it's going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him.

There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don't see that connection at all.

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value
we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.

Love can be understood only 'from the inside,' as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.

The dollar is currently the principal reserve currency in the world.

There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.

In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.

The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency.