He needs to be punished because the law hasn't punished him. He's never done any hard time.
One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.
[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [. . . ] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.
I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.
The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
When power corrupts, poetry cleanses
If I had not been a Shadowhunter, I would have had a future on the stage. I have no doubt I would have been greeted with acclaim.