I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted.

It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

The fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him . . . He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.