Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
~ Richard Rorty

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Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.
~ Richard Rorty

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Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister—corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear.
~ Richard Rorty

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The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics.
~ Richard Rorty

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Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.
~ Richard Rorty

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There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared.
~ Richard Rorty

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My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
~ Richard Rorty

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Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
~ Richard Rorty

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The reason for thinking that there will be no ‘last’ philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.
~ Richard Rorty

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The difference between people and ideas is … only superficial.
~ Richard Rorty

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