Richard Rorty Quotes on Politics
Richard Rorty grounded his political vision not in universal reason but in expanded human sympathy, and the quotes gathered here present it. Rorty defined liberalism, in a formulation marked here as attributed, as the hope that suffering will be diminished and that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease. He held that human solidarity is created, not discovered, built up by imaginatively extending our sense of us to include more and more people, rather than read off from a shared human essence. He thought cultural and political change comes chiefly through new vocabularies, so that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is its main instrument. Drawn from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and his essays, these passages present politics as the work of widening sympathy and diminishing cruelty.
Quotes
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Solidarity is created, not discovered.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Liberalism is the hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”
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“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.”
John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998). -
“When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of the defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency.”
"The priority of democracy to philosophy"