Richard Rorty Quotes

From my point of view, there is a tremendous amount to be said for secular humanism.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.