Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.

Freedom is an unprovable but unavoidable presupposition, not an article of faith.

Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.

When Marx, in the Theses on Feuerbach, says that only idealism up to now has understood the active side of material Praxis, what he says is more true of Fichte than of any other philosopher in the classical German tradition.

People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.

Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of "constructing" these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.