27 quotes
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
I do not recommend any legislative action against hermeneutics.
Anthropology and Politics (1995)
People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.
Legitimation of Belief (1975)
Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so.
Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.
Words and Things (1959)
Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction.
Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.
Words and Things (1959)
The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all.
The crisis in the humanities and in the mainstream of philosophy (1964)
Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
Words and Things (1959)
The idea that some of the members of the smooth, bland variety of second generation of linguistic philosophers undergo ”perplexity”, let alone intellectual cramp, has an element of high comedy.
Words and Things (1959)
Some economically brilliant groups of this kind have behind them a long tradition of dispersal, urbanization and minority status: this is clearly the case of the Jews, Greeks, Armenians or Parsees.
Hermeneutics between consenting adults should not, in my view, be the object of any statutory restrictions.
Anthropology and Politics (1995)
This is Disenchantment: the Faustian purchase of cognitive, technological and administrative power, by the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused, humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world.
Culture, Identity and Politics (1987)
Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.
Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)
It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.
America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.
Anthropology and Politics (1995)