Stanley Fish Quotes

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.

Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

And yet that performance has a method. Trump's artlessness, like Mark Antony's, is only apparent. Listen, for example, as he performs one of his favorite riffs. He begins by saying something critical of Mexicans and Chinese. Then he turns around and says, 'I love the Mexican and Chinese people, especially the rich ones who buy my apartments or stay at my hotels or play on my golf courses.' It's their leaders I criticize, he explains, but then in a millisecond he pulls the sting from the criticism: 'they are smarter and stronger than our leaders; they're beating us.' And then the payoff all this has been leading up to, the making explicit of what has been implied all along. 'If I can sell them condominiums, rent space to them in my building at my price, and outfox them in deals, I could certainly outmaneuver them when it came to trade negotiations and immigration.' (And besides, they love me.)

Here is the real message, the message that makes sense of the disparate pieces of what looks like mere disjointed fumbling: I am Donald Trump; nobody owns me. I don't pander to you. I don't pretend to be nice and polite; I am rich and that's what you would like to be; I'm a winner; I beat people at their own game, and if you vote for me I will beat our adversaries; if you want wonky policy details, go with those losers who offer you ten-point plans; if you want to feel good about yourselves and your country, stick with me.

So despite the lack of a formal center or a

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

...words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.

The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.

In his great book How to Do Things with Words (1962), J.L. Austin considers the apparently simple sentence "France is hexagonal." He asks if this is true or false, a question that makes perfect sense if the job of a sentence is to be faithful to the world. His answer is that it depends. If you are a general contemplating a coming battle, saying that France is hexagonal might help you assess various military options of defense and attack; it would be a good sentence. But if you are a geographer charged with the task of mapping France's contours, saying that France is hexagonal might cost you your union card; a greater degree of detail and fineness of scale is required of mapmakers. "France is hexagonal," Austin explains, is true "for certain intents and purposes" and false or inadequate or even nonsensical for others. It is, he says, a matter of the "dimension of assessment" -- that is, a matter of what is the "right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales." p. 26

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.