[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.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

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

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

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

"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.

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.