The major public goals in my life are intellectual goals. There are various philosophical things that I want to work on and work out.

The history of philosophy is actually full of people who argue for rather wild and incredible views, and their reputations are based on the skill of arguing for them.

Perhaps faith is a faith in one's self, the belief that one wouldn't feel so moved by the encounter if it weren't divine, a trust in one's own deepest positive responses. To doubt it would involve a self-alienation.

What I was really saying in 'The Examined Life' was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before.

The libertarian position I once propended now seems to me seriously inadequate, in part because it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric.

There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution 'to each according to his merit or value.'

Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process... is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlement over them.

Faith is caused by an encounter with something very real but which has extraordinary qualities which intimate the divine; the belief is due to an encounter which specially mirrors some divine quality.