Susan Neiman > Quotes

“As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.”
― Susan Neiman

“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

“[...] 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.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“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.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“...most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“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

“Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“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.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“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.”
― Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

“In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“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

“Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialize that component over which we have the least control.”
― Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke

“the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.”
― Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

“It’s an embarrassing fact that we are more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as a less grown-up than your peers.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“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.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“What drives pure reason to efforts that seem to have neither end nor result?”
― Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

“Twentieth-century philosophy is not unique in its ability to confuse puzzles with problems.”
― Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

“Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Is reality exhausted by what is, or does it leave room for all that could be?”
― Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy