The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.