Alasdair Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Alasdair yanked a pillow, shoving it under his arse. "I think you'll find I'm a heavy but remarkably fit and supple git, thank you very much." He spread his legs wide open and leered.
"With real self-esteem issues." Cosmo deadpanned.
"I will have if you don't hurry up and make love to me."
"Make love?" Aww, that's sweet."
"Less talking. More shagging."
"Yes, boss!" Cosmo saluted with his free hand ... — Josephine Myles

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other's, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic. — Alasdair MacIntyre

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. — Alasdair Gray

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

Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality; or, at the very least, you will have radically transformed its character. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder ... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have
very largely if not entirely
lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us. — Alasdair Gray

The medieval world then is one in which not only is the scheme of the virtues enlarged beyond an Aristotelian perspective, but above all in which the connection between the distinctively narrative element in human life and the character of the vices comes to the forefront of consciousness and not only in biblical terms. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses. — Alasdair Gray

We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict. — Alasdair MacIntyre

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

John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on "Twist and Shout" and the way he sings on "Strawberry Fields Forever" - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic. — Alasdair MacLean

What will I do when you're gone?" said Alasdair, with a faltering voice.
Bryeison placed a hand on his shoulder and said, with raging tranquility, "Do what is good and what is right. — Michelle Franklin

There is no chain of philosophical reasoning or method of philosophical enquiry through which we can arrive at the truths of faith as conclusions. But once by faith we have acknowledged those truths we are able to understand why there is good reason to acknowledge them. This, as he was to argue a little later, is because of the effects of sin on the human mind. It is "because human minds are obscured by familiarity with darkness, which covers them in a night of sins and bad habits, and are unable to perceive with the clarity and purity proper to reason" that authority has been provided to bring "the faltering eye into the light of truth" (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 31.2.31). — Alasdair MacIntyre

The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them. — Alasdair MacIntyre

You like the girl," Alasdair offered.
Nassar leveled a heavy gaze at him.
"Lillian said you tried to be funny in the car. I told her it couldn't possibly be true. The moment you try to make a joke, the sky shall split and the Four Horsemen will ride out, heralding Apocalypse. — Ilona Andrews

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. — Alasdair MacIntyre

I intend to dance once with everybody - except the other Joy. I'm going to dance twice with the other Joy."
"Why?"
"Because being unusually kind to someone will give me a feeling of power. — Alasdair Gray

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

At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Who did the council fight?"
"It split in two and fought itself."
"That's suicide!"
"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."
"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."
"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"
"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.
"You have a son?"
"Not yet. — Alasdair Gray

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture — Alasdair MacIntyre

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed. — Alasdair MacIntyre

They say the first of my kind was Alasdair, a human raised by hawks. She learned the languages of birds and was gifted with their form. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

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

Raymond Aron ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable.' ... while [Weber] holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational ... — Alasdair MacIntyre

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

There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore. — Alasdair MacLean

Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. — Alasdair Gray

The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I'm never sure what square to go to. Yet it can't be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively. — Alasdair Gray

Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others. — Alasdair Gray

Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices. — Alasdair MacIntyre

We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. — Alasdair MacIntyre

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. — Alasdair Gray

Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Trotsky's view that the gap between aspiration and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that tragedy will be permanently relevant to the contemporary human experience, seems far more faithful to Marx's view ... — Alasdair McIntyre

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.
Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it. — Alasdair Gray

Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distate for human problems? — Alasdair Gray

Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be found here in concentrated form. — Alasdair Gray

He watched them with the passionate regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart. — Alasdair Gray

It's in your hands whether he lives or dies, or stays as he is with one foot in each place," the old woman had said.
Doubt and homesickness opened a cavern inside her. She remembered how it felt to be filled with pain too great for her tortured mind and body, hoping someone would find her, forgive her, heal her. But now she feared Alasdair Og's darkness would consume her, and she would be as lost as he.
This time forever. — Lecia Cornwall

To be a philosopher is not of course necessarily to be in agreement with Aristotle. But it was increasingly an Aristotelian point of view that prevailed among Islamic philosophers and, when the greatest of the Islamic critics of philosophy, al-Ghazal!, attacks philosophers he identifies philosophy with Aristotelian philosophy. — Alasdair MacIntyre

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests, the story in which I believe myself to be a character is also the story in which I come to understand my nature and my destiny.1 My sense of who I am, where I should be heading, and what I should do next - I "own" all these in the context of what I believe to be true about the world, its history and destiny, the nature of divinity and humanity, and the good society. It is all very much bound up with the story in which I believe I find myself. — Iain W. Provan

I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man? — Alasdair Gray

I have the longing that all writers have for new ears to pour my words into. — Alasdair MacLean

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

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

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

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do. — Alasdair Gray

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

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action. — Alasdair McIntyre

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

People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people — Alasdair Gray

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

Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot. — Alasdair Gray

But the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history. — Alasdair MacIntyre

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it. — Alasdair Gray

War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation. — Alasdair Gray

The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content. — Alasdair Gray

Nowhere in politics is there such a mismatch between public and private realm as in transport. Everyone on the M6 last weekend would have agreed with Transport Minister Alasdair Darling's reported hatred of cars. They too wanted drivers off the roads and on to public transport. Go to it, Mr Darling, they cried in unison, get rid of all those cars. Except, of course, their own. Other people's cars are traffic. My car is the outward essence of my being. It is my hat, stick and cane. It embodies my freedom as a citizen and my right as a democrat. My car is my soul in flight. — Simon Jenkins

Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses. — Alasdair Gray

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

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory ... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo? — Alasdair MacIntyre

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

[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

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

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. — Alasdair Gray

At last she interrupted with a harsh rattle of laughter. "Oh, yes, I like this book! Crazy hopes of a glamorous, rich, colorful life and then abduction, rape, slavery. That book, at least, is true."
"It is not true. It is a male sex fantasy."
"And life for most women is just that, a performance in a male sex fantasy. The stupid ones don't notice, they've been trained for it since they were babies, so they're happy. And of course the writer of that book made things obvious by speeding them up. What happens to the Blandish girl in a few weeks takes a lifetime for the rest of us. — Alasdair Gray

Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror — Alasdair MacIntyre

You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes. — Alasdair Gray

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

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved. — Alasdair MacIntyre

I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart. — Alasdair Gray

I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in. — Alasdair Gray

I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would he quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love. — Alasdair Gray

Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness. — Alasdair MacIntyre

In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community's good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert. — Alasdair MacIntyre

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away. — Alasdair Gray

He may gain consciousness and feel like talking. I could leave a nurse here but their damned professional cheeriness depresses introspective men. Talk to him if he feels like it, and if he wants a doctor call me on this. — Alasdair Gray

Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention. — Alasdair MacIntyre

What satisfaction do you, personally, get from being a writer?" Lanark tried to remember. He said, "It's the only disciplined work I remember trying. I sleep better for it. — Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Fraser's Culburnie Records has quietly become one of the best Celtic music labels today. — Jim Lee

I wish I could make you like death a little more. It's a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into face, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life. — Alasdair Gray

What would happen if most people tried to act intelligently on their own behalf? Anarchy. ( ... ) So what can we do with this intelligence we don't need and can't use? Stupefy it. Valium for housewives, glue-sniffing for schoolkids, hash for adolescents, rotgut South African wine for the unemployed, beer for the workers, spirits for me and the crowd I left downstairs fifteen minutes ago. — Alasdair Gray

I'm afraid you'll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can't get along with others and still want to be special. — Alasdair Gray

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

She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel. — Alasdair Gray

People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon. — Alasdair Gray

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

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. — Alasdair MacIntyre

To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack. — Alasdair MacIntyre