54 Quotes by Richard Rorty

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?