Quotes from Stanley Fish

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

Just as you can practice three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales." p. 26

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.

Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman's inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can n choose to employ it in one way rather than another. (42)

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.

What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive