Richard Rorty Quotes & Sayings

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change, — Richard Rorty

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark — Richard Rorty

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. — Richard Rorty

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake. — Richard Rorty

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ... an ambition of transcendence. — Richard Rorty

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope? — Richard Rorty

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm. — Richard Rorty

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing. — Richard Rorty

What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren? — Richard Rorty

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power. — Richard Rorty

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. — Richard Rorty

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics. — Richard Rorty

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community for example, another country or historical period ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible. — Richard Rorty

[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science ... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams. — Richard Rorty

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths. — Richard Rorty

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love. — Richard Rorty

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe. — Richard Rorty

Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia. — Richard Rorty

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French. — Richard Rorty

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues. — Richard Rorty

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood. — Richard Rorty

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind. — Richard Rorty

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way. — Richard Rorty

I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins. — Richard Rorty

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition — Richard Rorty

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. — Richard Rorty

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative. — Richard Rorty

If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland--as a county of simulacra--and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics. — Richard Rorty

I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. — Richard Rorty

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade. — Richard Rorty

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions. — Richard Rorty

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice. — Richard Rorty

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world. — Richard Rorty

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [ ... ]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours. — Richard Rorty

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments. — Richard Rorty