Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

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.

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.

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?'

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

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