Richard Rorty Quotes

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [...]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?