Quote

Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.

Stanley Fish

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Stanley Fish
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: April 19
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Scholar
University Teacher
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Stanley Eugene Fish
May
Food
Session
Matter
Opinion
Junk
Like
Almost
Athletic
Starch
Feeling
Inquiry
Sated
Experience
Sharing
Exhaust
Feelings
Fill
Sessions
Truth
Hungry
Improves
Also
Leave
Sustained

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Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
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Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.
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I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.
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It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
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We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
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Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
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People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
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Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.
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The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.
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A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.
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Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.
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It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
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The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.
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In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
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Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
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Sentence writers are not copyists they are selectors.
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Just as you can practice three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.
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It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.
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Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value completeness of speech is an academic value relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.
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I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.
Stanley Fish