A Quote by Thomas Nagel
Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.
Related Quotes
The last word should be the last word. It is like a finishing touch given to color; there is nothing more to add. But what precaution is needed in order not to put the last word first.
I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.
Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better thanthe metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.
I wish the first word I ever said was the word "quote", so right before I die I could say "unquote".
We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God.
Marriage and parenting are the two strongest vows anyone will ever make. When you see these commitments being carelessly discarded, you can be certain that the ethics of that generation have been abandoned. ... What our society needs is a good dose of biblical ethic from God's people - the kind of ethic that requires us to keep our word no matter what the costs. Situational ethics have so shaped our society that even God's people have lost the concept of absolutes when it comes to keeping our word.
The one word you should forget when you start a new project is the word 'I' - you need to replace that word 'I' with the idea of 'everybody else.
The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.
The word 'right' should be excluded from political language, as the word 'cause' from the language of philosophy.
You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.
Drizzt had always suspected it, but now it was confirmed, that "welcome" was his favortie word in the Common Tongue, and a word, he understood with no equivalent in the language of the drow.
They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.
Between my brain and my mouth there should be a filter where common sense kicks in before I deliver a word, but I think when God made me he forgot the filter.
She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.
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