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

[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.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

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.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

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

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