Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve

It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.

[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.

The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.

Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture

Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.

To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.

The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am.

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.