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Rebecca Goldstein Quotes | Quotes said by Rebecca Goldstein

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #1

    (As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.


  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #2

    McCoy: Oh, there isn't any shortage of views clamoring to challenge my own. That's what we call the viewpoints of the pinheads, and fortunately nothing forces me to pay any attention to them.
    Plato: Except your own self-interest.
    McCoy, laughing: This just keeps getting better. I'm supposed to pay attention to the pinheads out of my own self-interest?
    Plato: Otherwise you must do all the hard work of challenging your own positions all by yourself. Isn't it better to get some help with so difficult a task? And wouldn't you call those who help you out your friends?
    McCoy: Why should I challenge my own positions? That's the job of my enemies, who it's my job to vilify.
    Plato: I would have thought it the job of your most valued friends.
    McCoy: I can't tell whether you're putting me on or not. Is this some kind of Ali G or Borat scam you're trying to pull here? Just answer me that. Are you putting me on? Have my stupid staff screwed up again and let in some Sacha Baron Cohen operative?
    Plato: I am sincere.
    McCoy: So I'm actually supposed to believe that you think friends are the ones who try to refute you?
    Plato: Certainly, when what I say is wrong; and I can't be certain it's not wrong unless I hear the best of the refutations that can be offered. And I hope I am a good enough friend to return the favor.
    --from the chapter entitled Plato on Cable News, pp. 350-351

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #3

    And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #4

    As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #5

    As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #6

    Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #7

    Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #8

    Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #9

    Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #10

    For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #11

    Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #12

    He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #13

    How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #14

    how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #15

    I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #16

    I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter Nike and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #17

    If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #18

    If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #19

    It has been claimed that Plato was an egalitarian; it has been claimed that he was a totalitarian. It has been claimed that he was the utopian, proposing a universal blueprint for the ideal state; it has been claimed that he was an anti-utopian, demonstrating that all political idealism is folly. It has been claimed that he was a populist, concerned with the best interests of all citizens; it has been claimed he was an elitist with disturbing eugenic tendencies. It has been claimed he was a romantic; it has been claimed that he was a prick. It has been claimed that he was a theorizer, with sweeping metaphysical doctrines; it has been claimed that he was the anti-theorizing skeptic, always intent on unsettling convictions. It has been claimed that he was full of humor and play; it has been claimed that he was as solemn as a sermon limining the torments of the damned. It has been claimed he loved his fellow man; it has been claimed he loves his fellow man. It has been claimed he was a philosopher who used his artistic gifts in the service of philosophy; it has been claimed he was an artist who used philosophy in the service of his art.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #20

    It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #21

    Kleos is sometimes translated as acoustic renown the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #22

    leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #23

    No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #24

    one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #25

    Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #26

    Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #27

    Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #28

    Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #29

    Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

  • Rebecca Goldstein Quote #30

    Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

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