I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

Sometimes one makes a distinction between urgency and importance. And while disasters are urgent, the basically most important thing is education. And that's what gives it ultimately urgency too, because unless you do it now, this important thing gets again and again postponed.

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

It’s very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.