Louis Menand Quotes

Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom

The indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.

Statistical fiction,

He defended them because he believed that every social interest should have its chance.

Holmes writes, …I also would fight for some things—but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like—or should like.

Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.

Good & universal (or general law) are synonymous terms in the universe.…

The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by foll...

Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.

It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

When you know that you know persecution comes easy.

For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce’s cosmology, everyone’s beliefs hav...

Confused begging of some philosophical question,

[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response fol...

Holmes never mentions Abbott again in any of the war correspondence or the diaries that survive.

In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have b...

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.

All that can be expected from modern improvements is that legislation should easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de facto supreme power in the com...

Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln’s firing of McClellan, who, despi...

James’s general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is by nature inferior to man. She is man’s inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physic...