And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)

— Rebecca Goldstein

(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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gun ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

— Rebecca Goldstein

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Leos is a tweak away.

— Rebecca Goldstein

He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

— Rebecca Goldstein