I was attracted to opera when I was 15 or 16. A very rich man in England bankrupted himself to put on a lot of opera during the war, but he converted a lot of people, myself included, in the process.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say, when I was at school, I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

'Humanity' is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.

People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.

The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.