Richard Rorty Quotes

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

Richard Rorty

#2. 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.

Richard Rorty

#3. 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

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

Richard Rorty

#5. 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

#6. 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.

Richard Rorty

#7. You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

#10. 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

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

#15. 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

#16. 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.

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

#19. 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

#20. All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

Richard Rorty

#21. 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

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Richard Rorty

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

Richard Rorty

#28. 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