The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

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.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

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.

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

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