Michael Sandel Quotes

21 quotes in 491 categories

• The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
• Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain.…
• Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
• Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on…
• The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of…
• A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people…
• There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that…
• Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring…
• [T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and…
• First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be…
• Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need…
• A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life…
• The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out…
• To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
• I am fortunate to have enough money not to have to worry about the necessities of life. Beyond that, I try to think about money…
• I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in…
• If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes…
• I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I…
• Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and…
• My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to…

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