24 Quotes by 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.

Without reflection, without sorrow, without shame, they’ve built around me great, high walls. And I sit here now and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate consumes my mind: because I had so many things to do out there.3.

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.

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

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.

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ’’Did the professor respect you?

In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings.

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.

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.