Why Grow Up? Quotes

“As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“[...] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“...most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is--or as it will be by the time the credits come up.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“It’s an embarrassing fact that we are more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as a less grown-up than your peers.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense is a mark of fundamentalism, whether of religious or market variety. In a child, such moments are appealing, necessary and usually harmless.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it’s harder than ever to use those experiences to grow. But growing up, I have argued, has been dogged by dilemma ever since it was a real option. As Enlightenment philosophers knew, it’s a process that is as socially determined as it is profoundly individual.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“What the Enlightenment rejected in the South Sea islands was what it perceived as a stupor, the docile submission to whatever bit of the given is coming your way. And what's coming your way is unlikely to be a breeze or a cow or a coconut, but a new kind of screen you can zap or click to create the illusion that life isn't passing you by.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealize the stages of youth. Watching the wide-eyed excitement with which babies face every piece of the world, we envy their openness and naivety, while forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stick-figure. The most pernicious bit of idealization is the very widespread view that the best time of one's life is the decade between sixteen and twenty-six, when young men's muscles and young women's skin are at their most blooming. That's due to hormones, and evolutionary biologists will explain that it happens for a reason. But your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one's life as the best one, we make that time harder for those who are going through it. (If I'm torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times of my life that, they all tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age