24 Quotes by Kwame Anthony Appiah

And though upper-class status doesn’t always entail having money, it does entail some social proximity to money. Real poverty, it has been observed, is about social isolation as much as it is about material deprivation; the poor don’t have the sort of friendship networks that the advantaged draw upon.29 That’s why we may balk at calling a penniless graduate student “poor.” Class is one way that you benefit from the money in the pockets of friends and acquaintances.

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

Self-regarding considerations can be as universalizable as other-regarding considerations: we owe things to ourselves as well to others.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes His little bit the whole to own.

This view is an instance of what my friend Skip Gates has called “cultural geneticism,“80 It has, in Bertrand Russell’s wicked phrase, “the virtues of theft over honest toil.” On this view, you earn rights to culture that is marked with the mark of your race – or your nation – simply by having a racial identity.

We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best.