The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.