Top 35 Robert Nozick Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Instead of trying to prove your opponent wrong, try to see in what sense he might be right.”

— Robert Nozick

2. “Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people’s lack of understanding of economics.”

— Robert Nozick

3. “No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified.”

— Robert Nozick

4. “You can’t satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.”

— Robert Nozick

5. “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”

— Robert Nozick

6. “Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?”

— Robert Nozick

7. “What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?”

— Robert Nozick

8. “Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.”

— Robert Nozick

9. “The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

— Robert Nozick

10. “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.”

— Robert Nozick

11. “The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults.”

— Robert Nozick

12. “Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.”

— Robert Nozick

13. “Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.”

— Robert Nozick

14. “Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.”

— Robert Nozick

15. “The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.”

— Robert Nozick

16. “Maximising the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average.”

— Robert Nozick

17. “Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.”

— Robert Nozick

18. “There is room for words on subjects other than last words.”

— Robert Nozick

19. “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”

— Robert Nozick

20. “A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means.”

— Robert Nozick

21. “And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.”

— Robert Nozick

22. “It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it’s also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.”

— Robert Nozick

23. “Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.”

— Robert Nozick

24. “Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.”

— Robert Nozick

25. “Justice in holdings is historical; it depends upon what actually has happened. We shall return to this point later.”

— Robert Nozick

26. “Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?”

— Robert Nozick

27. “When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato’s Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.”

— Robert Nozick

28. “I guess my tendency is to think essentially that the new wrinkles won’t do the job if the old major idea didn’t, and so you have to try something different. Then maybe they can all be combined in some coherent piece.”

— Robert Nozick

29. “It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.”

— Robert Nozick

30. “I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.”

— Robert Nozick

31. “What hadn’t been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.”

— Robert Nozick

32. “If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well... may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you?”

— Robert Nozick

33. “Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who’s seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they’re being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.”

— Robert Nozick

34. “Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies.”

— Robert Nozick

35. “Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’ theory or explain why not.”

— Robert Nozick

36. “We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on “survival” and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we’ll find out soon enough anyway – how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?”

— Robert Nozick