11 Quotes by Harry G. Frankfurt

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.

Civilizations... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.

So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know – and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of – a great many truths.