Quotes by Bernard Williams

“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.”

“We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.”

“Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.”

“The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestor...”

“Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair.”

“Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in ...”

“There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.”

“If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.”

“People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.”

“There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.”

“Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.”

“What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.”

“Two currents of ideas are very prominent in modern thought and culture. On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness--or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness aga...”

“Together with this demand for truthfulness, however, or (to put it less positively) this reflex against deceptiveness, there is an equally pervasive suspicion about truth itself: whether there is s...”

“Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historic...”

“A further turn is to be found in some unmasking accounts of natural science, which aim to show that its pretensions to deliver the truth are unfounded, because of social forces that control its act...”

“If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present t...”

“Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional i...”

“Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he ...”

“As Roland Barthes said, those who do not re-read condemn themselves to reading the same story everywhere: they recognize what they already think and know.”