Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

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?

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

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

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

What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

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.