Susan Neiman

“Sometimes realism seems to mean no more than the advice to plan ahead before you start a war. Sometimes realism means the…

— Susan Neiman

“Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.”

— Susan Neiman

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

— Susan Neiman

“The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.”

— Susan Neiman

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth…

— Susan Neiman

“The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense…

— Susan Neiman

“When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it’s…

— Susan Neiman

“Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.”

— Susan Neiman

“Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.”

— Susan Neiman

“how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?”

— Susan Neiman

“It’s a matter of logical structure: what is, just is, and any claim about what ought to be is a claim about…

— Susan Neiman

“Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not…

— Susan Neiman

“What drives pure reason to efforts that seem to have neither end nor result?”

— Susan Neiman

“What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better…

— Susan Neiman

“If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.”

— Susan Neiman

“Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is,…

— Susan Neiman

“Is reality exhausted by what is, or does it leave room for all that could be?”

— Susan Neiman

“In the field of behavioral economics, neoliberalism allows that human behavior often deviates from the model of Homo economicus. The deviations considered,…

— Susan Neiman

“Twentieth-century philosophy is not unique in its ability to confuse puzzles with problems.”

— Susan Neiman

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

— Susan Neiman

Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.

— Susan Neiman

“Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude.”

— Susan Neiman

“By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is…

— Susan Neiman

“Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent,…

— Susan Neiman

“If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be…

— Susan Neiman