Richard M. Rorty Quotes

#1. The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.

Richard M. Rorty

#2. The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

Richard M. Rorty

#3. There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Richard M. Rorty

#4. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.

Richard M. Rorty

#5. Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Richard M. Rorty

#6. Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology - those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.

Richard M. Rorty

#7. Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Richard M. Rorty

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

Richard M. Rorty

#9. The conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors] ... to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.

Richard M. Rorty

#10. 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 M. Rorty

#11. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared.

Richard M. Rorty

#12. 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 M. Rorty

#13. Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

Richard M. Rorty