Richard M. Rorty Quotes

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.”

— Richard M. Rorty

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

— Richard M. Rorty

“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.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts - just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

— Richard M. Rorty

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister
corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

— Richard M. Rorty

“What makes us moral beings is that ... there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit ... But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“The conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors] ... to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.”

— Richard M. Rorty

“The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.”

— Richard M. Rorty

The difference between people and ideas is ... only superficial.

— Richard M. Rorty

“Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology-those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.”

— Richard M. Rorty