The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

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

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.

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [...]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

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.

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

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.