Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve

Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.