Appiah Quotes

#1. I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#2. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#3. To me it's a mystery that you can show the horrific things in the movies, but not some sexual stuff which everyone does.

Seth Rogen

#4. (And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.)

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#5. I would have to have a bit of heroism and get out of myself. But I love myself so much!

Simone De Beauvoir

#6. Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#7. Mostly, we talk to impress. And sometimes we shut up to impress, too.

Nema Al-Araby

#8. Within the beautiful struggle of a cocoon all butterflies are made.

Jason Versey

#9. The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#10. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#11. The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question 'Did the professor respect you?

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#12. Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#13. In short - to overstate the point only slightly - because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#14. I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#15. This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#16. To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#17. If there is any secret to this life i live, this is it: the sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can. and there is nothing more to it than that.

Brian Andreas

#18. A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#19. Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#20. As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways.

Alfred Russel Wallace

#21. In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#22. When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.

Dave Barry

#23. It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect
and shame comes when you lose that title
a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#24. In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence

Bei Dao

#25. Everything's changed. The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry.

Richard D. Zanuck

#26. No one - apart from my agent, perhaps - should leave one of my shows in tears.

Bruce Forsyth

#27. Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray him to find out if he was happy. I

Stephen King

#28. I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#29. If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#30. In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.

Idries Shah