Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science.... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.