Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

Read! It is as important as breathing until you are breathing.

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

To pray is to communicate with the essence. Praying is calling home.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Jesus raised the standard high so we would realize we couldn’t possibly do it without a savior.

We all understand situations where it's swim or drown. Sometimes we surprise ourselves when we start swimming and see how well we can do it.

The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

Subjects have no greater liberty in a popular than in a monarchial state. That which deceives them is the equal participation of command.