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

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.

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

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.

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.

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

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