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

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

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.

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

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

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.