Richard Rorty Quotes

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

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

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

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

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

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

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

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

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

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

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

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.

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?

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

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

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.

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.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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