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

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

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

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

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.