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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

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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
Right
Crusades
Every
Supposed
Make
Especially
Always
Moral
War
Left
Else
Crusade
Government
Engages

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The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.
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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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We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.
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Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
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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.
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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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At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.
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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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Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
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What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?
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A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.
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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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Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
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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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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 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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I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
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