Clifford Geertz Quotes

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

Philosophy has degenerated into ideology.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

Science has liberated the ideas of those that read and reflect ... Science is progressive.

The public use of man's reason must always be free, and it alone can cause enlightenment.

The purpose of oratory or philosophy [is to] respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

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.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.

I think, when people hear the word 'philosophy,' they think of Plato and a bunch of people sitting around in their robes pontificating about life and how it should be. But really, somebody who is an active philosopher should not only be thinking of these things but putting them into practice.

Nothing is too absurd to be said by some of the philosophers.

I read all the great philosophers but most people just hear what they want to hear and it makes it easy for them to brand us devil worshippers.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic; since both are conversant with subjects of such a nature as it is the business of all to have a certain knowledge of, and which belong to no distinct science. Wherefore all men in some way participate of both; since all, to a certain extent, attempt, as well to sift, as to maintain an argument; as well to defend themselves, as to impeach.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

For me, who only desire to become wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical or Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence.