Richard Rorty famous quotes

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
-- Richard Rorty

#Friday #Sunday #Weekend

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

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
-- Richard Rorty

#Truth Is #Get Away

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
-- Richard Rorty

#Motivational #Belief

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

#Determined #Rational #Argumentation

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition
-- Richard Rorty

#Important #West #Moral

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
-- Richard Rorty

#Civilization #Intellectual #Tape

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 #Mind

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

#Fighting #Justice #Being Human

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

#Arguing #Talent #Chiefs

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
-- Richard Rorty

#Way #Compliment #Truth Is

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
-- Richard Rorty

#Love Is #Law #Civilization

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

#Country #Pride #Self

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

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 #Grandchildren

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

#Mind #Body #Easier

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 #Europe #Organization

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

#Essence #Paradise #Individual

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

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

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

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

#Thinking #Talking #Lunch

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.
-- Richard Rorty

#Age #Elements #World

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.
-- Richard Rorty

#Religious #Children #Silly

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
-- Richard Rorty

#Doe #World #Causes

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
-- Richard Rorty

#Recognition #Contingency

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

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.
-- Richard Rorty

#Ideas #Differences #People

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

#Grandchildren #World #Great Grandchildren

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
-- Richard Rorty

#Philosophy #Progress #Becoming

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

#Self #World #Replacements

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

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?
-- Richard Rorty

#Would Be #Hell

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

#World #Description

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 #Sake #Scripture

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

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