Richard Rorty Quotes

Quotes about:

• The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

  Richard Rorty

  World, Description

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

  38 Copy quote

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

  Richard Rorty

  Motivational, Belief, Deep Inside

  Richard Rorty (1982). “Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980”, p.42, U of Minnesota Press

  52 Copy quote

• Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

  Richard Rorty

  Vocabulary, Truth Is, Made

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.21, Cambridge University Press

  53 Copy quote

• Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

  Richard Rorty

  Truth Is, Get Away

  "Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007)". "The Philosopher's Zone" with Alan Saunders, www.abc.net.au. June 16, 2007.

  43 Copy quote

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

  Richard Rorty

  Arguing, Talent, Chiefs

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.7, Cambridge University Press

  35 Copy quote

• Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

  Richard Rorty

  Friday, Sunday, Weekend

  82 Copy quote

• To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

  Richard Rorty

  Age, Suggestions, Legacy

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

  46 Copy quote

• Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

  Richard Rorty

  Recognition, Contingency

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.326, Cambridge University Press

  12 Copy quote

• There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [...]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

  Richard Rorty

  Religious, Children, Silly

  47 Copy quote

• You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

  Richard Rorty

  Plato, Philosophical, Giving

  Interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, believermag.com. June 1, 2003.

  30 Copy quote

• All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

  Richard Rorty

  Dark, Relation, Humans

  Richard Rorty (1991). “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers”, p.205, Cambridge University Press

  33 Copy quote

• To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

  Richard Rorty

  Self, World, Replacements

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.35, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

• My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

  Richard Rorty

  Love, Law, Civilization

  Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty (2005). “The Future of Religion”, p.40, Columbia University Press

  30 Copy quote

• Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

  Richard Rorty

  Believe, Truth Is

  20 Copy quote

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

  Richard Rorty

  Philosophy, Progress, Becoming

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.8, Cambridge University Press

  28 Copy quote

• There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

  Richard Rorty

  Forever, Way, Speak

  "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity". Book by Richard Rorty, www.theguardian.com. 1989.

  18 Copy quote

• "True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

  Richard Rorty

  Way, Compliment, Truth Is

  "Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980". Book by Richard Rorty, 1982.

  36 Copy quote

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

  Richard Rorty

  Ideas, Differences, People

  12 Copy quote

• At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

  Richard Rorty

  Fighting, Justice, Being Human

  Richard Rorty (1999). “Philosophy and Social Hope”, ePenguin

  31 Copy quote

• The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

  Richard Rorty

  Important, West, Moral

  35 Copy quote

• National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

  Richard Rorty

  Country, Pride, Self

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Against bosses, against oligarchies: a conversation with Richard Rorty”, Prickly Pear (UK)

  29 Copy quote

• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Doe, World, Causes

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.6, Cambridge University Press

  17 Copy quote

• What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

  Richard Rorty

  Determined, Rational, Good French

  "Richard Rorty. What made him a crucial American philosopher?" by Stephen Metcalf, www.slate.com. June 18, 2007.

  31 Copy quote

• 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?

  Richard Rorty

  Would Be, Hell, Knows

  Interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The Believer Magazine, June 2003.

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Richard Rorty

  Citizens, Matter, Relation

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.65, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

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