National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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.

[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.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.