Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#3. 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

#4. Companies believe that more open space will boost productivity and creativity, but they have no evidence to prove it.

Anonymous

#5. On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

George Mikes

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#10. I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or better than friendship.

Pietro Aretino

#11. We are all living in some sort of a hell, Elena, all of us, but we don't make someone pay the price for our deeds, do you know why? because everyone of us chooses his own hell, the one that makes him most comfortable.

Juan Jose Millas

#12. I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

Sister Parish

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. You glided over to me and, as I was struggling to think of something intelligent to say, you said "There you are". I often think of that, Sue. Here I am. No matter where I am in the world, "Here I am".

Jessica Brockmole

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Often, without being at all aware of it, men judge themselves, not by God's rule, but by their own.

Charles Grandison Finney

#23. Like associates with like.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#24. With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

Thomas Hoving

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#26. My part in AC/DC is just adding the color on top.

Angus Young

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#28. That, Claire thought, was a pretty good definition of love: needing someone even after you got what you thought you wanted.

Rachel Caine

#29. 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