Latest Rebecca Goldstein Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Play, Soul

• A child's natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Past, Play

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.199, Atlantic Books Ltd

• In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Play, Roots

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.199, Atlantic Books Ltd

• What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Trying, Force

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.199, Atlantic Books Ltd

• One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Religious, Philosophical, People

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.18, Atlantic Books Ltd

• From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but pure water!"

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophy, Wine, Order

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.36, Atlantic Books Ltd

• For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Technology, Media, Greek

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.137, Atlantic Books Ltd

• The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Character, Helping, Moral

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.164, Atlantic Books Ltd

• Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Athlete, College, Artist

• In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Order, Argument, Conclusion

• And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Irrational Numbers, Legends, Students

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.31, Atlantic Books Ltd

• In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Morning, Atheist, Commitment

• Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Struggle, Accomplishment, Excellence

• Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophical, Thinking, Mind

  Rebecca Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.44, Pantheon

• What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Reality, Aspect, Instruments

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.28, Atlantic Books Ltd

• Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Philosophy, Philosophical

• It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Powerful, Political, Essentials

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.199, Atlantic Books Ltd

• I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Liars, Character, Ugly Things

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.149, Atlantic Books Ltd

• What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Play, Coercion

  "Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away". Book by Rebecca Goldstein, 2014.

• Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophy, People, Groups

• When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both - that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosopher, Worthy, Distinguished

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.146, Atlantic Books Ltd

• The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Believe, Important, Matter

• Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Reality, People

• Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Way, Philosopher

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.17, Atlantic Books Ltd

• And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Philosophy, Our World

  "Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away". Book by Rebecca Goldstein, 2014.