Stanley Fish Quotes

17 quotes in 284 categories

• Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the…
• The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'
• A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life,…
• The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.
• The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..
• This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
• No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.
• Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
• Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea…
• Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
• I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.
• In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be…
• It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
• It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in…
• Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can…
• We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
• I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

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