To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

The humanities prepare students to be good citizens and help them understand a complicated, interlocking world. The humanities teach us critical thinking, how to analyze arguments, and how to imagine life from the point of view of someone unlike yourself.

People don't just want to feel satisfied. They actually want to act.

Business leaders love the humanities because they know that to innovate you need more than rote knowledge. You need a trained imagination.

I think the obstacle for women is that their lives are intertwined with the lives of men. Change at the very deepest level of one's daily life and one's being is required if women are to be really equal.

Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment.... Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.