Michael Sandel Quotes

Quotes about:

• First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

  Michael Sandel

  Good Life, Rights, Justice

  Michael J. Sandel (2005). “Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics”, p.151, Harvard University Press

  57 Copy quote

• The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

  Michael Sandel

  Doe, Way, Determine

  33 Copy quote

• The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.

  Michael Sandel

  Real, Ideas, People

  29 Copy quote

• Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.

  Michael Sandel

  Perfect, Democracy, Doe

  Michael J. Sandel (2012). “What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”, p.225, Macmillan

  28 Copy quote

• Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.

  Michael Sandel

  Needs, Want, Limits

  Michael J. Sandel (2009). “Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?”, p.265, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  37 Copy quote

• It's ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake.

  Michael Sandel

  Purpose, Love Of Learning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

  Michael Sandel

  Tools, Politics, Way

  Michael J. Sandel (2012). “What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”, p.13, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  30 Copy quote

• Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

  Michael Sandel

  Self, Innocence, Lost

  34 Copy quote

• The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.

  Michael Sandel

  Past, Greed, Expansion

  "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets". Book by Michael Sandel, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2012.

  12 Copy quote

• To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

  Michael Sandel

  Spiritual, Justice, Moral

  27 Copy quote

• A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

  Michael Sandel

  Motivation, Inspiration, People

  18 Copy quote

• You can't go wrong with fish and chips.

  Michael Sandel

  Chips, Fish And Chips, Fishes

  15 Copy quote

• In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality.

  Michael Sandel

  Pregnancy, Eggs, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

  11 Copy quote

• Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.

  Michael Sandel

  Mean, Egalitarianism, Ideas

  "'Whether we are arguing about MPs' expenses or assisted suicide, we need to engage with the moral ideals underlying our political debates'". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2009.

  21 Copy quote

• There's no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives.

  Michael Sandel

  Justice, Democracy, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• They say the state should not impose on its citizens a preferred way of life, but should leave them as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

  Michael Sandel

  Liberty, Citizens, Way

  "Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics".

  19 Copy quote

• I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Thinking, Parent

  Source: www.pbs.org

  16 Copy quote

• Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

  Michael Sandel

  What Matters, Perfect, People

  "What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel - review" by John Lanchester, www.theguardian.com. May 17, 2012.

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• In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion- - over nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy.

  Michael Sandel

  Jobs, Careers, Mastery

  Source: www.pbs.org

  11 Copy quote

• If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Humility, Ambition

  Source: www.pbs.org

  13 Copy quote

• Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it's all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free - and, in fact, it isn't. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

  Michael Sandel

  Thinking, Assumption, Behavior

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease - these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine.

  Michael Sandel

  Medicine, Suffering, Relief

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• Over the past three decades, markets and market thinking have been reaching into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. As a result, we've drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society.

  Michael Sandel

  Past, Thinking, Economy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.

  Michael Sandel

  Frustration, Japan, Europe

  11 Copy quote

• If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

  Michael Sandel

  Basketball, Children, Disappointment

  Source: www.pbs.org

  9 Copy quote

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