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"Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture - for persons and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our acquaintance. The easiest way of doing that is to read books, and so ironists spend more time placing books than in placing real live people." ~ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
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"If philosophy is an attempt to see how 'things in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term,' then it will always involve the construction of images which will have characteristic genres of writing. One may wish to say, as I do, that the seventeenth-century image is outworn - that the tradition which it inspired has lost its validity. But that is quite a different criticism from saying that this tradition misunderstood something or failed to solve a problem. Skepticism and the principal genre of modern philosophy have a symbiotic relationship. They live one another's death, and die one another's life." ~ Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
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"Consider sentences as strings of marks and noises emitted by organisms, strings capable of being paired off with the strings we ourselves utter (in the way we call ‘translating’). Consider beliefs, desires, and intentions – sentential attitudes generally – as entities posited to help predict the behavior of these organisms. Now think of those organisms as gradually evolving as a result of producing longer and more complicated strings, strings which enable them to do things they had been unable to do with the aid of shorter and simpler strings. Now think of us as examples of such highly evolved organism, of our highest hopes and deepest fears as made possible by, among other things, our ability to produce the peculiar strings we do. Then think of the four sentences that precede this one as further examples of such strings. Penultimately, think of the five sentences that precede this one as a sketch for a redesigned house of Being, a new dwelling for us shepherds of Being. Finally, think of the last six sentences as yet another example of the play of signifiers, one more example of the way in which meaning is endlessly alterable through the recontextualization of signs. Those last seven sentences are an attempt to hold animals, Dasein, and différance in a single vision: to show how one can modulate from Darwinian through Heideggerian to Derridean without much strain. They are also an attempt to show that what is important about both traditions, the one that runs up to Davidson and the one that runs up to Derrida, is not what they say but what they do not say, what they avoid rather than what they propound.†~ Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Volume Two
"National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement" ~ Achieving Our Country