Top 35 Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

2. “The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

3. “Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

4. “Man is essentially a story-telling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to truth.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

5. “It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

6. “Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

7. “Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

8. “Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

9. “The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

10. “The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

11. “The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

12. “Morality which is no particular socity’s morality is to be found nowhere.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

13. “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

14. “At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

15. “Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

16. “From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

17. “What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

18. “A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

19. “In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

20. “Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

21. “Man is... essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question of ’what story or stories do I find myself a part of?”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

22. “Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

23. “If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

24. “I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

25. “History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

26. “To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

27. “Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

28. “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

29. “The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

30. “At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

31. “I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

32. “All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

33. “Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

34. “Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

35. “To say that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

36. “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

37. “It is a necessary condition of rationality that a man shall formulate his beliefs in such a way that it is clear what evidence would be evidence against them and that he shall lay himself open to criticism and refutation... But to foreclose on tolerance is precisely to cut oneself off from such criticism and refutation. It is gravely to endanger one’s own rationality by not admitting one’s own fallibility.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

38. “Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre