The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

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

[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.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

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.