“(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society m...”

“Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value....”

“As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.”

“And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)”

“Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual c...”

“The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.”

“Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.”

“Women helped each other in ways small and large every day, without thinking, and that was what kept them going even when the world came up with new and exciting ways to crush them.”

“I am not smart, I pay attention.I am not considerate, I listen.I am not patient, I make time. Im not lucky, I work hard.”

“You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”

“If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medicati...”

“...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)”

“Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. ”

“Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.”

“I could not think without writing.”