Top 50 Michael J. Sandel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things.”

— Michael J. Sandel

2. “The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.”

— Michael J. Sandel

3. “The more we regard our success as our own doing, the less responsibility we feel for those who fall behind.”

— Michael J. Sandel

4. “To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise.”

— Michael J. Sandel

5. “The debate over the priority of the right over the good is ultimately a debate about the meaning of human freedom.”

— Michael J. Sandel

6. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”29.”

— Michael J. Sandel

7. “Moral excellence does not consist in aggregating pleasures and pains but in aligning them, so that we delight in noble things and take pain in base ones. Happiness is not a state of mind but a way of being, “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”

— Michael J. Sandel

8. “The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just.”

— Michael J. Sandel

9. “Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.”

— Michael J. Sandel

10. “The most obvious reason for giving the best flutes to the best flute players is that doing so will produce the best music, making us listeners better off. But this is not Aristotle’s reason. He thinks the best flutes should go to the best flute players because that’s what flutes are for – to be played well.”

— Michael J. Sandel

11. “Honesty is the best policy. It’s also the most profitable.”

— Michael J. Sandel

12. “Government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person from himself, or to impose the majority’s beliefs about how best to live. The only actions for which a person is accountable to society, Mill argues, are those that affect others. As long as I am not harming anyone else, my “independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”19.”

— Michael J. Sandel

13. “If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you’ll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.”

— Michael J. Sandel

14. “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.”

— Michael J. Sandel

15. “Here then is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant’s idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake – a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls cannot.”

— Michael J. Sandel

16. “If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth?”

— Michael J. Sandel

17. “Conformity, in Mill’s account, is the enemy of the best way to live.”

— Michael J. Sandel

18. “Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what’s just without arguing about the nature of the good life.”

— Michael J. Sandel

19. “The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic.”

— Michael J. Sandel

20. “It is said that the Puritans banned bearbaiting, not because of the pain it caused the bears but because of the pleasure it gave the onlookers.”

— Michael J. Sandel

21. “Those who are greatest in civic excellence – not the wealthiest, or the most numerous, or the most handsome – are the ones who merit the greatest share of political recognition and influence.”

— Michael J. Sandel

22. “Putting aside the issue of how compelling her need for money may have been, and how significant her understanding of the consequences, we suggest that her consent is irrelevant. There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy.41.”

— Michael J. Sandel

23. “Outrage is the special kind of anger you feel when you believe that people are getting things they don’t deserve. Outrage of this kind is anger at injustice.”

— Michael J. Sandel

24. “It isn’t easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society.”

— Michael J. Sandel

25. “A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.”

— Michael J. Sandel

26. “If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods – income and wealth, power and prestige – I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due.”

— Michael J. Sandel

27. “For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.”

— Michael J. Sandel

28. “Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.”

— Michael J. Sandel

29. “The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.14.”

— Michael J. Sandel

30. “I am thinking of the everyday ways that conscientious, well-to-do parents help their kids. Even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources, and connections.”

— Michael J. Sandel

31. “Happiness is not a state of mind but a way of being, “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”

— Michael J. Sandel

32. “Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself – not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.”

— Michael J. Sandel

33. “Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea.”

— Michael J. Sandel

34. “For Aristotle, politics is about something higher. It’s about learning how to live a good life.”

— Michael J. Sandel

35. “Call center technology enables companies to “score” incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places.”

— Michael J. Sandel

36. “We’re not only sentient beings, governed by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also rational beings, capable of reason. If reason determines my will, then the will becomes the power to choose independent of the dictates of nature or inclination.”

— Michael J. Sandel

37. “If meritocracy is an aspiration, those who fall short can always blame the system; but if meritocracy is a fact, those who fall short are invited to blame themselves.”

— Michael J. Sandel

38. “This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”23 This is the formula of humanity as an end.”

— Michael J. Sandel

39. “Being good at making money measures neither our merit nor the value of our contribution.”

— Michael J. Sandel

40. “Markets express and promote certain attitudes to the goods being exchanged.”

— Michael J. Sandel

41. “First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.”

— Michael J. Sandel

42. “If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities.”

— Michael J. Sandel

43. “Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.”

— Michael J. Sandel

44. “Few politicians speak that way today. In the decades after RFK, progressives largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising.”

— Michael J. Sandel

45. “But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule.”

— Michael J. Sandel

46. “But beyond fairness and productivity, the liberal argument also gestured toward a third, more potent ideal implicit in the case for markets: Enabling people to compete solely on the basis of effort and talent would bring market outcomes into alignment with merit. In a society where opportunities were truly equal, markets would give people their just deserts.”

— Michael J. Sandel

47. “Another way of putting this point is to say that morality is not empirical. It stands at a certain distance from the world. It passes judgment on the world. Science can’t, for all its power and insight, reach moral questions, because it operates within the sensible realm.”

— Michael J. Sandel

48. “Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.”

— Michael J. Sandel

49. “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

— Michael J. Sandel

50. “They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.”

— Michael J. Sandel