The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.