Quotes from Bernard Williams

Utilitarians are often immensely conscientious people, who work for humanity and give up meat for the sake of the animals. They think this is what they morally ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standard. They do not, and perhaps could not, ask: How useful is it that I think and feel like this?

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate

Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your family and friends, to place—we are nothing. We are creatures of kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

That an action would be cowardly is not often found by an agent to be a consideration in its favor, but it could be, and in a counterethical way, ministering to a masochism of shame.

The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality's being inescapably pure, but from religion's being incurably unintelligible.

Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others

The only serious enterprise is living.

The marks of philosophy are reflection and heightened self-awareness, not maximal transcendence of the human perspective. . . . There is no cosmic point of view, and therefore no test of cosmic significance that we can either pass or fail.

It is not that disagreement needs explanation and agreement does not, but that in different contexts disagreement requires different sorts of explanation, and so does agreement.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

The truth is that we all have to do more things than we can rightly do, if we are to do anything at all.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

'Humanity' is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a Pirate.

What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.

I was attracted to opera when I was 15 or 16. A very rich man in England bankrupted himself to put on a lot of opera during the war, but he converted a lot of people, myself included, in the process.

People who express themselves in paradoxes are in a strong position; and the more outrageous the paradox, in general the stronger the position.

People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.

If we try and fail, we have temporary disappointments. But if we do not try at all, we have permanent regrets.

You are mature when you know what is foolhardy and what is courage.

We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.