RICHARD RORTY

Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

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

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

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.

I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.

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

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another, rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

If the terrorists were to explode even one suitcase-sized nuclear weapon in a Western city, democratic institutions might not survive. The security agencies in the Western democracies would be granted, or would simply seize, powers comparable to those of the Gestapo and the KGB…. I doubt that democratic institutions will be resilient enough to stand the strain.

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

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

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

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.

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.

[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science.... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams.

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community - for example, another country or historical period... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

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?

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

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

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.