Wisdom Quotes

"Liberal societies can accommodate reasonable disagreement about the good life."

"The veil of ignorance represents a fair way of choosing principles of justice."

"The original position is an impartial procedure for identifying fair principles of justice."

"The original position is a model of choice that represents certain procedural constraints on fairness."

"Common sense is a collection of practices and intuitions refined by experience and corrected by science."

"To understand a sentence is to know under what conditions it is true."

"Science and common sense differ in degree, not in kind."

"Every belief we hold is part of a system that must be judged as a whole."

"Madness has been systematically excluded from rational discourse, revealing how societies define normalcy through exclusion."

"The asylum was not a place of cure but a space of containment and moral management."

"The humanist tradition represents not the apex of civilization but a particular historical moment that is now passing."

"The prison did not fail; it succeeded in creating a carceral society that extends far beyond prison walls."

"We must be willing to think against ourselves, to question the assumptions that have shaped our identities."

"The modern individual is not a discovery but an invention of particular historical and discursive practices."

"To speak of human nature is to speak from within a particular historical moment that may soon pass."

"We are not imprisoned by discourse, but we cannot think or act outside of it either; we must work within and against it."

"To think is to think against the grain of existing knowledge, to find the limits and contradictions within it."

"Self-ownership is fundamental; each person is an end in themselves, not merely a means to others' ends."

"Side constraints on actions provide moral limits that cannot be violated even for good consequences."

"Moral constraints are side constraints on action, not goals to be maximized."

"Morality consists of constraints on how we may treat others, not goals we must achieve."

"Charity is admirable but cannot be demanded as a matter of justice."

"Rights provide protections that cannot be overridden by aggregate social benefit."

"Violating rights for good consequences treats people as means rather than ends."

"Moral side constraints cannot be violated to achieve patterned distributions."

"Moral principles provide constraints on action, not merely goals to pursue."

"Rights protect individuals from being sacrificed for the greater good."

"Respecting persons as ends requires limiting how we may use them."

"I may not be smarter than you, but I can admit when I'm wrong."

"We cannot jump off our own shadows."