"If ideologies are cultures, they need to be learned. You can convert in and out of them, just as with religions."

"Whatever else the history of philosophy is, it is the history of the tensions between philosophy’s public-facing and scholastic tendencies"

"The more we affect and are affected by others, the more we can perceive and understand the plurality of other human lives and experiences."

"A crucial function of academic research is to produce knowledge that informs our collective decisions in a democracy.

"Comedic happiness, initiated through surprise and propelled by laughter, must constitute an act of subversion."

"Contradiction is a problem for knowing, a problem for doing things together, and a problem for living and feeling."

"Our habitual ways of speaking and thinking can seem inadequate to the task of expressing the reality of being human."

"Just as perception is not the enemy of reason despite its fallibility, neither is imagination."

"Absurdity, most generally, consists in a disparity between our expectations or pretentions and reality."

"Philosophy at the service of the authority’s demands for deference and submission might not really be philosophy at all."

"Trust has value in itself because it is an expression of our agency, even of what we might call our personhood."

"Politics is that activity which is seen most clearly by the one who has no place."