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

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.

A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

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.