Richard Rorty Quotes

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work

If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but it was a different era, a different country then.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

Corporations did not achieve the scale we normally associate with them until the 1880s; but it's still hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would offered much in the way of determined opposition. William Herndon said that they always thanked the Lord when a corporation came knocking at their office door to hire them.

I'm a history person; I love history. But I am conditioned by the present.

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).