My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

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.

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.