Top 98 Alasdair Quotes
#1. Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#2. At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#3. The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#4. He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart.
Alasdair Gray
#5. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.
Alasdair Gray
#6. The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I'm never sure what square to go to. Yet it can't be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.
Alasdair Gray
#7. She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.
Alasdair Gray
#8. What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Alasdair MacIntyre
#9. 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.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#10. The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.
Alasdair Gray
#11. Do what is right and what is good.
Bryeison to Alasdair before going to his death on the battlefield.
Michelle Franklin
#12. The characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#13. The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
Alasdair MacIntyre
#14. I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.
Alasdair Gray
#15. Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.
Alasdair Gray
#16. 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.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#17. I have the longing that all writers have for new ears to pour my words into.
Alasdair MacLean
#18. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It
Alasdair MacIntyre
#19. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#20. 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.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#21. Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.
Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.
Alasdair Gray
#22. A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#23. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#24. The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man
Alasdair MacIntyre
#25. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
Alasdair Gray
#27. The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#28. We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#29. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#30. The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#31. You like the girl," Alasdair offered.
Nassar leveled a heavy gaze at him.
"Lillian said you tried to be funny in the car. I told her it couldn't possibly be true. The moment you try to make a joke, the sky shall split and the Four Horsemen will ride out, heralding Apocalypse.
Ilona Andrews
#32. Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#33. Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
Alasdair MacIntyre
#34. Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.
Alasdair Gray
#35. Lanark said irritably, "You seem to understand my questions, but your answers make no sense to me."
"That's typical of life, isn't it?
Alasdair Gray
#36. Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses.
Alasdair Gray
#37. Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#38. Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us.
Alasdair Gray
#39. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#40. He may gain consciousness and feel like talking. I could leave a nurse here but their damned professional cheeriness depresses introspective men. Talk to him if he feels like it, and if he wants a doctor call me on this.
Alasdair Gray
#41. But the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#42. They say the first of my kind was Alasdair, a human raised by hawks. She learned the languages of birds and was gifted with their form.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
#43. People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.
Alasdair Gray
#44. I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in.
Alasdair Gray
#45. I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.
Alasdair Gray
#46. There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore.
Alasdair MacLean
#47. Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be found here in concentrated form.
Alasdair Gray
#48. Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.
Alasdair Gray
#49. The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied.
Alasdair Gray
#50. But I do enjoy words - some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent -
Alasdair Gray
#51. John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on "Twist and Shout" and the way he sings on "Strawberry Fields Forever" - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic.
Alasdair MacLean
#52. [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.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#53. Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot.
Alasdair Gray
#54. I ought to have more love before I die. I've not had enough.
Alasdair Gray
#55. Alasdair Fraser's Culburnie Records has quietly become one of the best Celtic music labels today.
Jim Lee
#56. I remember the period in the 1980s where the Beatles were terminally uncool, and it seemed to me then like they were just my little secret, and the rest of the world didn't know anything about them.
Alasdair MacLean
#57. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.
John Cornwell
#58. For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#59. It is, but we can only help people by giving less than we take away from them. We enlarge the oasis by increasing the desert. That is the science of time and housekeeping. Some call it economics.
Alasdair Gray
#60. She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel.
Alasdair Gray
#61. What will I do when you're gone?" said Alasdair, with a faltering voice.
Bryeison placed a hand on his shoulder and said, with raging tranquility, "Do what is good and what is right.
Michelle Franklin
#62. The present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended,
Alasdair MacIntyre
#63. Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distate for human problems?
Alasdair Gray
#64. It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#65. People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
Alasdair Gray
#66. The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#67. ... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms
Alasdair MacIntyre
#68. There were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.
Alasdair Gray
#69. Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).
Alasdair MacIntyre
#70. What satisfaction do you, personally, get from being a writer?" Lanark tried to remember. He said, "It's the only disciplined work I remember trying. I sleep better for it.
Alasdair Gray
#71. 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?" Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Wesley Hill
#72. You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.
Alasdair Gray
#73. I wish I could make you like death a little more. It's a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into face, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life.
Alasdair Gray
#74. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#75. I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#76. At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#77. Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
#78. I intend to dance once with everybody - except the other Joy. I'm going to dance twice with the other Joy."
"Why?"
"Because being unusually kind to someone will give me a feeling of power.
Alasdair Gray
#79. I'm afraid you'll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can't get along with others and still want to be special.
Alasdair Gray
#80. You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.
Alasdair Gray
#81. Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others.
Alasdair Gray
#82. 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,
Alasdair MacIntyre
#83. Trotsky's view that the gap between aspiration and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that tragedy will be permanently relevant to the contemporary human experience, seems far more faithful to Marx's view ...
Alasdair McIntyre
#84. Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#85. Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#86. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#87. The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#88. Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#89. We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#90. One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.
Alasdair Gray
#91. Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police.
A character's response to a discussion about eating from the tree of knowledge.
Alasdair Gray
#92. Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.
Alasdair Gray
#93. But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves.
Alasdair Gray
#94. You are the most irritating man I've ever met!"
He grinned. "But you like my kisses."...
"Am I not to have dreams, or desires, or enjoy - pleasure? 'Twon't do, Alasdair Og Sinclair, kissing a lass, and then forbidding her to have any more, when it's your fault I like kisses.
Lecia Cornwall
#95. Would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul - does
Alasdair MacIntyre
#96. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.
Alasdair Gray
#97. Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#98. Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.
Alasdair Gray
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