Rebecca Goldstein

“If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.”

“(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 must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.”

“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 can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.”

“If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.”

“I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.”

“Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.”

“Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.”

“That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.”

“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.”

“Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.”

“Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.”

“Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.”

“What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?”

“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.”

“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. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.”

“I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.”

“No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?”