Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes

“Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect
and shame comes when you lose that title
a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“(And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.)”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Yet in making our choices we must sometimes start with a vision, however inchoate, of what it is for a human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights. It is my argument that we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them together we are being faithful to a long tradition. In the humanities,
I think, we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is the only way to make a future worth hoping for.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public and the private deliberations about any statute many inconsistent reasons will be offered for framing a clause one way or another; many suggestions, not all of them consonant with one another, will be offered as to what the overall aims of the statute are. To extract from this mishmash of mixed motives a singular coherent intention will usually be impossible.46”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what
we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah

“I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.”

— Kwame Anthony Appiah