Michael Dirda Quotes

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Even as I pursued a doctorate in the history of ideas in my native Denmark, I realized I had neither the encyclopedic training nor the passion for cool logic - not to mention the nerve - to follow in the footsteps of classical liberal philosophers and economists such as Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

I have a long-term interest in the humanities.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

When I got to Princeton I made a point of attending the Philosophy Club and listening to the lectures, but I didn't get involved in any discussions in those clubs. I guess after the first year, I dropped that.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

I'd like to do policy and I'd like to do philosophy, I'd like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument - that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.