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I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

Richard Rorty

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Richard Rorty
Age: 75 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 4
Died: 2007
Died: April 8
Pedagogue
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Richard McKay Rorty
Richard M. Rorty
Ideas
Book
Thing
Bookish
Kind
Utopian
Think
Intellectual
Thinking
Interested
Books
History

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We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.
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The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.
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Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.
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At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.
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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.
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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.
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Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
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I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.
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Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
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Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of knowingness- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.
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What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?
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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.
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I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.
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All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark
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I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.
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My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.
Richard Rorty
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Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
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A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.
Richard Rorty
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Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war any war has to be a moral crusade.
Richard Rorty