Top 35 Richard Rorty Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.”

— Richard Rorty

3. “Freedom is the recognition of contingency.”

— Richard Rorty

4. “Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.”

— Richard Rorty

5. “We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.”

— Richard Rorty

6. “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”

— Richard Rorty

7. “All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark.”

— Richard Rorty

8. “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

9. “At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.”

— Richard Rorty

10. “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

— Richard Rorty

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

— Richard Rorty

12. “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

13. “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

14. “If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.”

— Richard Rorty

15. “Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.”

— Richard Rorty

16. “Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.”

— Richard Rorty

17. “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

— Richard Rorty

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Richard Rorty

20. “Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.”

— Richard Rorty

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

— Richard Rorty

22. “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

23. “What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.”

— Richard Rorty

24. “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”

— Richard Rorty

25. “The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.”

— Richard Rorty

26. “To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.”

— Richard Rorty

27. “Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.”

— Richard Rorty

28. “I think you can have a Left that isn’t culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.”

— Richard Rorty

29. “The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition.”

— Richard Rorty

30. “I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.”

— Richard Rorty

31. “What makes us moral beings is that... there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit... But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one’s choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.”

— Richard Rorty

32. “What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?”

— Richard Rorty

33. “Ontology is more like a playground than a science.”

— Richard Rorty

34. “Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology – those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.”

— Richard Rorty

35. “But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.”

— Richard Rorty