Quotes from Louis Menand

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.

James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them.

They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.

Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.

in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind 'mirroring' reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn't stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored … knowledge must therefore be social.

We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.

Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.

Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.

culture is a blob of mercury. Whenever you try to put a finger on it, it takes a different shape.

No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.

It was one of those moments when the universe is poised to plunge down a different path.

Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them.

It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals—molecules or humans—might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.

According to Peirce] 'The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.' … nominalism denies the social altogether … 'the community is to be considered as an end in itself'… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle.

Addams's] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination.

If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

In "The Free World," Louis Menand paraphrased Hannah Arendt to describe the early 20th-century proponents of totalitarianism as "the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were the embodiments of the politics of resentment.

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.