45 Quotes by Stanley Fish

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

Eighteen months tops, everybody's gone. The accomplishments you've already achieved will fade away like butter in the sun. In the university world, if you pause for a while, and two or three years later, you say we can start again, you're farther back than you were when the whole enterprise began.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.