Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes

18 quotes in 368 categories

• Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite…
• Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive;…
• Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a…
• At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
• It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance…
• I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I…
• The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
• A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive…
• Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
• Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of…
• We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict,
• There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts,…
• The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
• Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
• It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
• [M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal…
• Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an…
• Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

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