Quotes from Kwame Anthony Appiah

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ''Did the professor respect you?

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

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

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.

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

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.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes His little bit the whole to own.

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.

The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic state could boldly identify itself with a people's Will; liberal states must content themselves with a general willingness. The romantic state rallies its citizens with a stirring cry: "One people!" The liberal state's true anthem is: "We can work it out.

Without reflection, without sorrow, without shame, they've built around me great, high walls. And I sit here now and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate consumes my mind: because I had so many things to do out there.3

Identities can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences: you don't get to be called "English" because there's an essence this label follows; you're English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label—that you are connected in the right way with a place called England.

This view is an instance of what my friend Skip Gates has called "cultural geneticism,"80 It has, in Bertrand Russell's wicked phrase, "the virtues of theft over honest toil." On this view, you earn rights to culture that is marked with the mark of your race— or your nation—simply by having a racial identity.

More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity "are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values."19

the assertion of an identity always proceeds through contrast or opposition;

The story (...) suggests that we can't help caring about the traditions of "the West" because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that *would* be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a Western destiny.

Jag vill hävda att det inte finns några naturliga gränser för det folk man anser sig vara en del av.

Att vara ett folk är inte bara en fråga om hur man ser på sig själv . Vad andra utanför gruppen tycker är också viktigt. Identitet, som vi lärde oss i det första kapitlet, är en överenskommelse mellan insiders och outsiders.