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

"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.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

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.