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Instead of trying to prove your opponent wrong, try to see in what sense he might be right.

Robert Nozick

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Robert Nozick
Age: 63 †
Born: 1938
Born: November 16
Died: 2002
Died: January 23
Philosopher
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Robert Edwin Nozick
Might
Right
Trying
Opponent
Opponents
Prove
Instead
Wrong
Sense

More quotes by Robert Nozick

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Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?
Robert Nozick
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And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.
Robert Nozick
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There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
Robert Nozick
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What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
Robert Nozick
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In a free system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able to bring about its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and more people see how it works more and more will wish to participate in or support it. And so it will grow, without being necessary to force everyone or a majority or anyone into the pattern.
Robert Nozick
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I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
Robert Nozick
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The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.
Robert Nozick
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Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics.
Robert Nozick
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Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.
Robert Nozick
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Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.
Robert Nozick
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Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.
Robert Nozick
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No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do not control temperature.
Robert Nozick
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I guess my tendency is to think essentially that the new wrinkles won't do the job if the old major idea didn't, and so you have to try something different. Then maybe they can all be combined in some coherent piece.
Robert Nozick
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The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults.
Robert Nozick
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Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?
Robert Nozick
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Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.
Robert Nozick
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You can't satisfy everybody especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.
Robert Nozick
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Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.
Robert Nozick
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Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.
Robert Nozick
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Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out the environment in which people are free to do their own thing the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.
Robert Nozick