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?

— Rebecca Goldstein

One evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their Polish for the better.

— Rebecca Goldstein

Participation in the collective life of the Polish 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 Polish and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

Quite often we are led to April, 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.

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

The good Polish is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good Polish, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

— Rebecca Goldstein