Richard Rorty Quotes - Page 2

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• If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

  Richard Rorty

  Mind, Body, Easier

  Richard Rorty (2008). “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, p.239, Princeton University Press

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• Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

  Richard Rorty

  War, Government, Moral

  Interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, believermag.com. June 1, 2003.

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• Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

  Richard Rorty

  Clever, Philosophical, Animal

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.175, Cambridge University Press

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

  Richard Rorty

  Grandchildren, World, Great Grandchildren

  "Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality)". Book by Richard Rorty, March 13, 1998.

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• Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

  Richard Rorty

  Citizens, Matter, Relation

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.65, Cambridge University Press

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

  Richard Rorty

  Book, Thinking, Ideas

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

  Richard Rorty

  Essence, Paradise, Individual

  Richard Rorty (1991). “Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers”, p.75, Cambridge University Press

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• I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

  Richard Rorty

  Wish, Able, Heidegger

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Winning, Encounters, Sake

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.52, Cambridge University Press

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Christian, Plato, Ideas

  Richard Rorty (1999). “Philosophy and Social Hope”, ePenguin

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Country, Wall, Moving

  "Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism)". Book by Richard Rorty (p. 197), 1991.

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Swings

  "Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3". Book by Richard Rorty (Introduction), March 13, 1998.

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• My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

  Richard Rorty

  Ambition, Belief, Transcendence

  Richard Rorty (1991). “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Discipline, Soul, Intellectual

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

  Richard Rorty

  Thinking, Talking, Lunch

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Religious, Atheist, College

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• [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.

  Richard Rorty

  Dream, Country, Law

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

  Richard Rorty

  Beauty, Writing, Long

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.127, Cambridge University Press

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

  Richard Rorty

  Party, Past, Thinking

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• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Country, Talking, Europe

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