44 Quotes by Susan Neiman

By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don’t have another. (p.107)

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

Everything short of an explanation of the world as a whole is frustratingly partial. An explanation of the world must include an answer to why the world as a whole is just that way. And the only truly satisfying answer would be: because it’s the best of all possible ones.

What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better way to keep people longing for childhood than to paint a picture of adulthood no right-minded soul could ever want?

And we have seen how Rousseau’s insistence on creating a world that makes sense ultimately vitiates his attempt to educate a child for a world that does not.

The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense is a mark of fundamentalism, whether of religious or market variety. In a child, such moments are appealing, necessary and usually harmless.