This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us –– black, white, and brown –– are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such.

If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines.

When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements –– a way of thinking which is, supposedly, at the root of both selfishness and sadism.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister – corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.

The sectarian divisions which plagued Marxism are manifestations of an urge for purity which the Left would be better off without.

If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines

[T]he American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin.