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.
--Stanley Fish
Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.
--Stanley Fish
Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
--Stanley Fish
Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.
--Stanley Fish
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.
--Stanley Fish
It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
--Stanley Fish
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.
--Stanley Fish
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.
--Stanley Fish
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
--Stanley Fish
No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.
--Stanley Fish
Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.
--Stanley Fish
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.
--Stanley Fish
Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.
--Stanley Fish
Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
--Stanley Fish
The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'
--Stanley Fish
The idea- the core idea of humanism- is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.
--Stanley Fish
The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.
--Stanley Fish
This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
--Stanley Fish
We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
--Stanley Fish
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.
--Stanley Fish
Found 20 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).