Quotes by Stanley Fish

“A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against God who infuses life at the moment of conception. 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.”

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

“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.”

“It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someones moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.”

“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.”

“Eighteen months tops, everybodys gone. The accomplishments youve already achieved will fade away like butter in the sun. In the university world, if you pause for a while, and two or three years later, you say we can start again, youre farther back than you were when the whole enterprise began.”

“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.”

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

“There is no room at all, in the hiring process, which is heavily scripted, for revealing political and religious orientation.”

“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.”

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. Its like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitchers mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you cant walk the walk.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

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