Richard Rorty

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.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

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

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

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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?

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.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.