Historiography cannot, by itself, answer the question about the criter — Mark D. Jordan

"In December 1976, the Dade County Metro Commission passed unanimously on first reading an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of "affectional or sexual preference" in employment and housing. The commissioner proposing the ordinance was Ruth Shack, wife of one of Anita Bryants booking agents. Indeed, Anita had recorded radio spots for Ruths election campaign. After the resolution passed, a local attorney, Robert Brake, decided that because the nondiscrimination ordinance contained no religious exemptions, it would force local churches and their schools to hire avowed homosexuals. The fear from the first was about gay men, though television reporters would later explain, with the pedantry of new learning, that "by homosexual we are referring to both men and women." Already an advocate for conservative causes, Brake began to use political and church networks to organize a petition drive that would force a popular referendum on the ordinance. It was no longer enough to declare religious space exempt from civil rights regulations. Religious values had to be proclaimed to the world- and imposed on it in the name of religious exemption."

"One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when most humanistic disciplines—not to say, literature and all of the fine arts—have passed through several generations of radical formal innovation, theology is still written as if the conventional forms posed no problems."

"Aristippus is credited with having said that those who stop short of philosophy in the preparatory studies are like Penelopes suitors: they marry the maids, but not the mistress."

"Socratic trustworthiness depends upon devices of irony, both spoken and acted. … The irony of words prevents Socrates from being taken as the source of doctrines. The irony of actions prevents Socrates from being made into the literal founder of a philosophic school. … The ironic voice does not seek to possess the student, but directs him, lustlessly, to the desire of philosophy itself ."

"Once one learns how to speak a language, the authority of the language has fulfilled its aim, but is not thereby overcome. Authority remains as the entry to the inquiry one has undertaken. It is not overcome or passed by so much as it is actualized, fulfilled. That is why philosophic reformations seem too often to be nested within what it is they seek to reform. Insofar as it begins from its predecessor, every attempted reformation is only the confession of the authority of its predecessors discourse. The appearance of abrupt revolutions in philosophy is produced only by ignoring, sometimes ingenuously, the authority of previous speech."

"The end of philosophic education, on many ancient views, is not a body of propositions to be measured against an equally propositional and already apprehended truth. The end is, rather, the having (hexis, habitus) of abiding intellectual excellences, of a power (arete, virtus) to think truthfully."