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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.