Robert Nozick Quotes

#1. Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics.

Robert Nozick

#2. Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?

Robert Nozick

#3. Justice in holdings is historical; it depends upon what actually has happened. We shall return to this point later.

Robert Nozick

#4. If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well ... may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you?

Robert Nozick

#5. Certainly the emphasis I place in this chapter on coordination of behavior and cooperation to mutual benefit is something that ought to be very congenial to people in the libertarian tradition.

Robert Nozick

#6. A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means.

Robert Nozick

#7. Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

Robert Nozick

#8. Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

Robert Nozick

#9. Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

Robert Nozick

#10. I guess my tendency is to think essentially that the new wrinkles won't do the job if the old major idea didn't, and so you have to try something different. Then maybe they can all be combined in some coherent piece.

Robert Nozick

#11. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

Robert Nozick

#12. No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do
not control temperature.

Robert Nozick

#13. Once a person exists, not everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to violate those claims.

Robert Nozick

#14. It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

Robert Nozick

#15. And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.

Robert Nozick

#16. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

Robert Nozick

#17. Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

Robert Nozick

#18. From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

Robert Nozick

#19. It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.

Robert Nozick

#20. No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified.

Robert Nozick

#21. Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.

Robert Nozick

#22. Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.

Robert Nozick

#23. The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults.

Robert Nozick

#24. The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Robert Nozick

#25. What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?

Robert Nozick

#26. Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

Robert Nozick

#27. The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.

Robert Nozick

#28. Instead of trying to prove your opponent wrong, try to see in what sense he might be right.

Robert Nozick

#29. Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Robert Nozick

#30. I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

Robert Nozick

#31. There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.

Robert Nozick

#32. Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.

Robert Nozick

#33. The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Robert Nozick

#34. When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

Robert Nozick

#35. Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.

Robert Nozick

#36. It's the level that allows us each to live our own chosen lives. But I notice not everyone agrees with the primary importance of that level, and I try to account for how they don't.

Robert Nozick

#37. You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.

Robert Nozick

#38. What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

Robert Nozick