Quote

The question is, we have a particular problem. How many religions are there in the United States? How are they going to get on together? One way, which has been the usual way historically, is to fight it out, as in France in the sixteenth century. That's a possibility.

John Rawls

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Rawls
Age: 81 †
Born: 1921
Born: February 21
Died: 2002
Died: November 24
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Baltimore
Maryland
Rawls
John Bordley Rawls
Way
Particular
Historically
Fighting
Religions
United
Usual
Problem
France
Together
Possibility
States
Fight
Many
Question
Going
Century
Sixteenth

More quotes by John Rawls

Image
Political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just Society of Peoples.
John Rawls
Image
Now the good of political life is a great political good. It is not a secular good specified by a comprehensive doctrine like those of Kant or Mill. You could characterize this political good as the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another: the duty to give citizens public reasons for one's political actions.
John Rawls
Image
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.
John Rawls
Image
You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.
John Rawls
Image
The good of political life is the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another and supporting the institutions of a constitutional regime.
John Rawls
Image
Citizens can have their own grounding in their comprehensive doctrines, whatever they happen to be.
John Rawls
Image
A political conception just applies to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property, and so on.
John Rawls
Image
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
John Rawls
Image
Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.
John Rawls
Image
If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.
John Rawls
Image
A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.
John Rawls
Image
There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.
John Rawls
Image
The idea of public reason isn't about the right answers to all these questions, but about the kinds of reasons that they ought to be answered by.
John Rawls
Image
A political conception covers the right to vote, the political virtues, and the good of political life, but it doesn't intend to cover anything else.
John Rawls
Image
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
John Rawls
Image
Of course, we know that not everyone agrees with assisted suicide, but people might agree that one has the right to it, even if they're not themselves going to exercise it.
John Rawls
Image
There are various ways you might define the common good, but that would be one way you could do it.
John Rawls
Image
The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
John Rawls
Image
Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like.
John Rawls
Image
The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.
John Rawls