Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.

This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.

We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.

It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed.

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.