Quotes from Richard Rorty

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

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

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

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?

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

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.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

What makes us moral beings is that...there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit...But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.

the conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors]...to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.

But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.

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

The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.

Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.

the homosexual,' 'the Negro,' and 'the female' are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good.

Ontology is more like a playground than a science.

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

the utilitarian test for whether the suggestion made proves to be "good in the way of belief." Granted that hearing what such a being has to say may change your wants, nevertheless you test those new wants and that purported truth in the same way: by living them, trying them out in everyday life, seeing whether they make you and yours happier. Suppose that a source which you believe to

There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which was become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.