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

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.

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.

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.

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

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

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