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Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Reality
Better
Polis
People
Paraphrasing
Reformed
Plato
Republic
Reform
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More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.
Rebecca Goldstein
What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.
Rebecca Goldstein
There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.
Rebecca Goldstein
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
I think the humanities always have to take science, our great knowledge that we get from science, into account, but then try to answer the human questions and try to make sense out of our lives, taking into account all of the scientific knowledge.
Rebecca Goldstein
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
Rebecca Goldstein
Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
Rebecca Goldstein
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
Rebecca Goldstein
Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. [If] what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses.
Rebecca Goldstein
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
Rebecca Goldstein
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.
Rebecca Goldstein
What is love? When you love somebody then I mean we all want good things to happen to ourselves and keep the bad things at bay. When you love somebody you want that as much for them if not more than you do for yourself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.
Rebecca Goldstein
To matter ... Is there any human will deeper than that? ... We don't want to live when we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never matter. ... We no sooner discover that we are than we desperately want that which we are to matter.
Rebecca Goldstein
It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
Rebecca Goldstein
One doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life.
Rebecca Goldstein
The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved's recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love.
Rebecca Goldstein
