Stanley Fish Quotes

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.