How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?

— Rebecca Goldstein

How irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,

— Rebecca Goldstein

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 valence action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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 tortuously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.

— 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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of necessitated being.

— Rebecca Goldstein

It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

— Rebecca Goldstein

Leos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.

— Rebecca Goldstein