Macintyre Quotes

#1. Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.

Richard K. Morgan

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Robert Kurson

#5. 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

#6. The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm", that intoxicating, beguiling and occasionally lethal English quality.

Ben Macintyre

#7. Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.

Ben Macintyre

#8. ... 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

#9. 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

#10. As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.

Ben Macintyre

#11. It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#12. John Masterman once wrote: Sometimes in life27 you feel that there is something which you must do, and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person. Some call it conscience and some plain obstinacy. Well, you can take your choice.

Ben Macintyre

#13. 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

#14. Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

Ben Macintyre

#15. For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#16. [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

#17. Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife.

Ben Macintyre

#18. If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

Ben Macintyre

#19. The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.

Ben Macintyre

#20. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the 'inner ring', the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.

Ben Macintyre

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#25. What is the use of living if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?

Ben Macintyre

#26. The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity. He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets.

Ben Macintyre

#27. For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.

Ben Macintyre

#28. 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

#29. 'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

Ben Macintyre

#30. Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#31. 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

#32. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#33. 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

#34. Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#35. We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#36. Would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul - does

Alasdair MacIntyre

#37. A willingness to offer advice on matters that are quite beyond the ken of the adviser seems to be a habit in this part of the world.

Alex Macintyre

#38. The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture

Alasdair MacIntyre

#39. 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

#40. 'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

Ben Macintyre

#41. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#42. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It

Alasdair MacIntyre

#43. To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility-that is the means to real peace ...

Ben Macintyre

#44. I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

Ben Macintyre

#45. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

Ben Macintyre

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Ben Macintyre

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#53. 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

#54. Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#55. Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

Ben Macintyre

#56. Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open.
Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.

Ben Macintyre

#57. But the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#58. 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

#59. Britain's counterespionage officers saw signs of treachery in everything Ivor Montagu did: they saw it in his friends, his appearance, his opinions, and his behavior. But above all, they saw it in his passionate, and dubious, love of table tennis.

Ben Macintyre

#60. 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

#61. Like all truly selfish people, Kliemann believed the minutiae of his life must be fascinating to all.

Ben Macintyre

#62. Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve

Alasdair MacIntyre

#63. Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#64. The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

Ben Macintyre

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#69. All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#70. The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man

Alasdair MacIntyre

#71. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

Alasdair MacIntyre