Richard Rorty Quotes

Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.

I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place.

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Men, according to their constitutions and the circumstances in which they are placed, differ honestly in opinion.

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

We're humans. Why always turn human attitude into political behaviours? I hate that.

America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.

Our ideological dilemmas won't ever be solved by machines.

The only thing that I've really noticed in my own experience is just people kind of saying that a woman, when they react to something exciting, 'Oh, that's a masculine way of reacting.' And to me, that's absurd. It's like, that's how humans - they get excited, and you yell, and you jump, and you flex. That's what you do.

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story.

Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface. But sometimes, there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie.

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

By men's words we know them.

It is easier to understand mankind in general than any individual man.

We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit.

Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.

Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.