What is a sentence, anyway?

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

The idea – the core idea of humanism – is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,...

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we’re doing it, is teach and learn.

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It’s like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field – first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher’s mound – without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can’t walk the walk.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is – although we all think that we are.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone’s moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is ‘What am I trying to do?’

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.