Stanley Fish Quotes

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

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

Just as you can practice three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

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

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

Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?

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

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

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

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

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

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.

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.

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

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.

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

The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.

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

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