In every issue of tpm, our mediawatch column collects pithy quotes by philosophers and about philosophy from the mass media. Here’s our selection of the best of 2009, with links to the original sources.

Philosophy, you understand, is a very pharmacopoeia of cures that are worse than the corresponding diseases.
Jerry Fodor, Times Literary Supplement, October 16

Any subject that has alpha-male status will breed complacency
Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education, September 27

Fidelity to law, as such, cannot be a constitutional philosophy because a judge needs a constitutional philosophy to decide what the law is.
Ronald Dworkin, New York Review of Books, September 24

The American public’s real objection to the bonuses – and the bailout – is not that they reward greed but that they reward failure.
Michael Sandel, New Statesman, September 10

In “robust” democracies there should be no need to defend press freedom, because nobody would ever think to challenge it.
Umberto Eco, Sunday Telegraph, September 6

Optimality has been a huge enemy of the practical.
Amartya Sen, Forum: A World of Ideas, BBC World Service, 2 August

Right-wing talk of moral clarity can be empty, but that is not the same as being meaningless: empty concepts remain concepts in search of an application.
Susan Neiman, New Humanist, July/August

Facts are stubborn. Not all problems can be resolved by intelligent compromise; some are not soluble at all. It is part of the literature of fact to recognise this feature of life.
John Gray, New Statesman, 16 July

Conventional wisdom contends that the current recession was caused by the free-market zealotry of recent economic policy and by excessively low interest rates. It is an absurd view, given that interest rates are not determined by market forces.
Jamie Whyte, The Times, 2 July

Nigel Warburton

Many of us would like to believe that intellect banishes prejudice. Sadly, this is itself a prejudice.
Nigel Warburton, Prospect, July

I feel like a magician who is only producing hats and never rabbits
Slavoj Žižek, Financial Times, 7/8 March

Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for.
Roger Scruton, The American Spectator, March 2009

Scruton is an accomplished popular journalist – and when he chooses to stir, he does it with a shovel.
Jonathan Rée, Prospect, March 2009

Philosophy has no equations, predictions, or conclusive confirmations – that is precisely why some of us become philosophers in the first place.
Keith Ward, The Independent, 10 February

We may not be professional revolutionaries anymore, but we do make a profession of fierce argument.
Michael Walzer, Dissent, Spring 2009

Call me old-fashioned, but poetry, philosophy, physics, and investigative journalism cannot be blogged and crowd-sourced.
Joshua Cohen, Boston Review, 9 March

Timothy Williamson

Analytic philosophers have a sound methodological instinct to start with simpler, more ordinary cases and build up gradually to the complicated, sexy ones; for advertising purposes, that’s a drawback.
Timothy Williamson, 3:AM Magazine, 25 April

It is completely wrong that UK law does not enable me to protect myself or my children from the loss of my self by arranging to be killed if the surgery goes wrong.
Soran Reader, Times Higher Education, 8 January

That seems to me a genuinely wicked thing to do – to disregard what somebody had quite explicitly said, that he wants to die – not to be resuscitated in certain circumstances and in certain circumstances to be helped to commit suicide.
Mary Warnock, LifeSiteNews.com, 7 January