"Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"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."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"Freedom is the recognition of contingency."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"Truth [is] what is better for us to believe."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"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."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"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?"
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister - corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"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."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"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."
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
"What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?"
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
“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.”
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
“Ontology is more like a playground than a science.”
— Richard Rorty (1931-2007)