Harry Frankfurt Quotes & Sayings

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. — Harry Frankfurt

I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted. — Harry Frankfurt

It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. — Harry Frankfurt

As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness. — Harry Frankfurt

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be. — Harry Frankfurt

Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled-whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. — Harry Frankfurt

The fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him ... He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. — Harry Frankfurt