There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.
The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder. . . . What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
The TV commercials, which are endless and fairly crass, gave birth to Brock, the bad-lawyer character in Razor Girl. In real life you can find even sleazier examples than him.
Do you want a world with. . . more joy and happiness? Then find your own joy and happiness and contribute to the joy and happiness of others.
Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.
I have now reached the happy age of 23. No, happy is not quite the right word. At this particular moment I am certainly not happy.