Quotes from Alasdair MacIntyre

To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.

[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.

we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.

What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy.

Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture

The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means

Man is essentially a story-telling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to truth.

If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man

To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.

History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.