"What I’d like to try today is to do something a little different. And that’s to place philosophy in a historical context, and then go through that and follow the mutation of problems, centered on what it means to be human."

"So, what we will pursue now, in a discussion that unfortunately has to be far too brief, will be ideals of Excellence in Roman society, and I am going to run through those. Some of them are fairly well known to us today. So I am going to run through a few of those ideals of human excellence."

"So what we are going to do now is to move into a new kind of world, in which the problems of everyday life from which philosophical problems arise and which they try to address in a certain way [ideology]."

"In “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill wants to do one simple thing. He wants to show us where the grounds are for the government’s legitimate interference with our liberty. Mill wants to answer the question “When can the state legitimately interfere with our liberty”."

"There is another side of Hegel, a more conservative side that argues that while his view remains historical, that history as it were, the context within which all activities, truth and so on gets its meaning and in which human beings become what he calls “spirit”…"

"So now I am going to drop back a level and look at some of the other factors that go into the formation of human values other than – although I still think these are crucially important – other than the economic ones. And for that purpose, I just can’t restrain myself from looking at a couple more of the critics of Modernity. You might call it critics of modern life, of the modern state, the modern economy, and of the conditions in which a modern culture is formed. And one of those critics that I think has come under fire in Time magazine and elsewhere, is Nietzsche. You may have heard of him: Nietzsche."

"Daniel Bell argues that an answer to America’s problems is a rebirth of religion, but almost everything counts against that in a society divided. Where labour is divided the way ours is, and where the first thing that would happen if we had a rebirth of it would be experts in it, specialists, and new TV shows about it. Which is where we get onto Kierkegaard and his brilliant attempt to try to save more than Christianity as a personal, singular relation with something else, about which Kierkegaard won’t say much. But what he calls… what I will call his attack on Christendom, and it’s not so different than Nietzsche’s."

"Well, this last part, where I am going to talk about Freud, is similarly not therapeutic, because that’s not the interesting part of Freud to me. The book I have suggested is “Civilisation and its Discontents“, which stands… which has nothing to do… doesn’t discuss at all Freud’s Oedipal drama, so there will be no talk of penis envy. I mean, whatever Freud may have thought about that, or why, I don’t care. This has to do with the processes that are, as it were – to follow a parallel kind of argument with Marx’s – much of human civilisation has been built by economic motivations of which people were culturally unaware."