“ If relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we. would each have to end up by saying, From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right. A… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being wor… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ The story of sacred texts has always been the story of their readers: of shifting and often clashing interpretations. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, I think nothing human alien to me. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ People have long known in America what many in Europe have come to grasp—that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common ancestry. In the second decade of the twenty-fi… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ This view is an instance of what my friend Skip Gates has called cultural geneticism,80 It has, in Bertrand Russell's wicked phrase, the virtues of theft over honest toil. On this view, you earn right… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.) Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordialconsciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic statecould boldly id… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values.19 Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ In the world of identity, utterances have functions, separate from their meanings. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United Stat… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of whatwe say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ A value is like a fax machine: it’s not much use if you’re the only one who has one. Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement,… Kwame Anthony Appiah
“ Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feel… Kwame Anthony Appiah
