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.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

"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.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

[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.