Susan Neiman Quotes

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

— Susan Neiman

“One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.”

— Susan Neiman

“Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.”

— Susan Neiman

“If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.”

— Susan Neiman

“[ ... ] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.”

— Susan Neiman

“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.”

— Susan Neiman

“Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.”

— Susan Neiman

“In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)”

— Susan Neiman

“Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.”

— Susan Neiman

Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.

— Susan Neiman

Most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.

— Susan Neiman

“You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.”

— Susan Neiman

Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is
or as it will be by the time the credits come up.

— Susan Neiman

“Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.”

— Susan Neiman

“Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure
because goodness makes you feel more alive.”

— Susan Neiman

“Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.”

— Susan Neiman

“Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.”

— Susan Neiman

Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.

— Susan Neiman

“Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.”

— Susan Neiman

“Dogma
ideas uninformed by experience
is a form of ingratitude.”

— Susan Neiman

“What the Enlightenment rejected in the South Sea islands was what it perceived as a stupor, the docile submission to whatever bit of the given is coming your way. And what's coming your way is unlikely to be a breeze or a cow or a coconut, but a new kind of screen you can zap or click to create the illusion that life isn't passing you by.”

— Susan Neiman

Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.

— Susan Neiman

“Home is the normal
whatever place you happen to start from and return to without having to answer questions. It's a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we've abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about.”

— Susan Neiman

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.”

— Susan Neiman

“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”

— Susan Neiman

“Not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself”

— Susan Neiman

“We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.”

— Susan Neiman