Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

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.

One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.