Top Rebecca Goldstein Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Rebecca Goldstein Biography

Rebecca Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (born February 23, 1950) is an American philosopher who is also a novelist and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books, many of which cross the divide between fiction and non-fiction. Her Princeton Ph.D. was in philosophy of science, and she is sometimes grouped with novelists, such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.

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Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.

Opposed, Philosophy, Progress, Said

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

Aspect, Aspects, Instruments, Observation, Reality, Refining

It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed.

Cherish, Critics, Important, Man, Men, Philosopher

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

Answers, Forget, Questions, Spectacle

To matter, to mind. . . . What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. . . . Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

Mind, Tragedy, May, Say, Matter

What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

Cities, Immortals, Mortal, Philosophy, Religious, Terms

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.

Adults, Children, Collective, Survival, Time, Vulnerability

To matter. . . Is there any human will deeper than that?. . . We don't want to live when we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never matter. . . . We no sooner discover that we are than we desperately want that which we are to matter.

Deeper, Human, Matter, Sooner, Want

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

Daughter, Nike, Sneakers, Friend, Chose

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

Artist, Athlete, Athletes, College, Exclusive, People

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

Google, Products, Think, Thinking, Tools, Understand

Having your husband at a party is like adding anchovies to a salad. I love anchovies, but you can't taste anything else.

Adding, Husband, Party, Salad

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

Accomplishment, Agnostic, Caught, Excellence, Struggle

Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.

Covers, Philosophical, Progress, See, Track

Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

Belief, Compassion, Dying, Goodness, Soup Kitchens, Thinking

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

Answers, Array, Philosophy, Problems, Thinking, Thinks

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.

Access, Body, Loneliest, Mysterious, Possibility, Soul

Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.

Identity, Mother, Size, Trying

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

Aristocratic, Family, Men, Philosophical, Plato

Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter - self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. Culture has relapsed back into the self-aggrandizing, glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him.

Culture, Fall, Mean, Questions, Rampant, Self

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