Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide.

There are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don't have the same moral weight as medicine or health.

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life.

Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.

If you go back to Adam Smith, you find the idea that markets and market forces operate as an invisible hand. This is the traditional laissez-faire market idea. But today, when economics is increasingly defined as the science of incentive, it becomes clear that the use of incentives involves quite active intervention, either by an economist or a policy maker, in using financial inducements to motivate behavior. In fact, so much though that we now almost take for granted that incentives are central to the subject of economics.