Home > Author > Susan Neiman
21 " If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks. "
― Susan Neiman , Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists
22 " [...] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth. "
23 " Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another. "
24 " Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down. "
25 " Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive. "
26 " great thinkers simply got stuck out of sheer curiosity investigating very general questions about the way things are. "
― Susan Neiman , Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
27 " Home is the normal--whatever place you happen to start from and return to without having to answer questions. It's a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we've abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about. "
28 " When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it’s harder than ever to use those experiences to grow. But growing up, I have argued, has been dogged by dilemma ever since it was a real option. As Enlightenment philosophers knew, it’s a process that is as socially determined as it is profoundly individual. "
― Susan Neiman , Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
29 " Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is--or as it will be by the time the credits come up. "
30 " Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime. "
31 " Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it. "
32 " A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. "
33 " the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought. "
34 " Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world. "
35 " Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it. "
― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
36 " Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right. "
37 " Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude. "
38 " What the Enlightenment rejected in the South Sea islands was what it perceived as a stupor, the docile submission to whatever bit of the given is coming your way. And what's coming your way is unlikely to be a breeze or a cow or a coconut, but a new kind of screen you can zap or click to create the illusion that life isn't passing you by. "
39 " Twentieth-century philosophy is not unique in its ability to confuse puzzles with problems. "
40 " The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself. "