"Kierkegaard, William James, Thoreau, and others I admire are very close to Nietzsche in his condemnation of philosophers who will not or cannot reflect on their own persons: that is, wholly professionalized philosophers."

"Philosophers who function within analytic traditions tend to reflect on the self in a way that unwittingly impoverishes and objectifies self."

"In this distancing, are aspects of our own reality as persons deeply concealed, and the concealment concealed? Are many professors of philosophy today afraid to reflect? I think so."

"Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul.”"

"The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, apparently, of how they (and their professors, presumably) have come to hold such a view, they have no idea of how it might be criticized, or who they are who hold it."

"[According to John Locke] the enlightened philosopher is to accept a subordinate position: he must be, says Locke, an “underlaborer” to the empirical scientist."

"Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is."

"In light of the evolutionary links and behavioural similarities between humans and higher animals, it is hard to believe that belief-desire psychology could explain human behaviour, but not animal behaviour. If humans have beliefs, so do animals."

"I am convinced, based on more than three decades of studying NRMs through participant-observation and through interviews with both members and ex-members, that these movements have unleashed social and psychological forces of truly awesome power. These forces have wreaked havoc in many lives - in both adults and in children. It is these social and psychological influence processes that the social scientist has both the right and the duty to try to understand, regardless of whether such understanding will ultimately prove helpful or harmful to the cause of religious liberty. … the real sociological issue ought not to be whether brainwashing ever occurs but rather whether it occurs frequently enough to be considered an important social problem."

"Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. … It seems to me that at the very heart of the controversy over the existence of mind control is a bias toward believing in the power of people to resist the power of situational forces, a belief in individual will power and faith to overcome all evil adversity. It is Jesus modeling resistance against the temptations of Satan, and not the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to deception. More recently, examples abound that challenge this person-power misattribution."

"Brainwashing is defined as an observable set of transactions between a charismatically-structured collectivity and an isolated agent of the collectivity with the goal of transforming the agent into a deployable agent. Brainwashing is thus a process of ideological resocialization carried out within a structure of charismatic authority."