Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not w… - Mary McCarthy

A spasm of irritation shook him. He could not determine where their machinations ended and his own over-active intelligence began the work of conjecture — it was the old philosophical stickler: how to distinguish the mind's knowledge of its objects from its experience of its own processes? In short, can we know anything, he muttered under his breath.

Peter, a philosophy minor, was an adept of the Kantian ethic; he had pledged himself never to treat anyone as a means ('The Other is always an End: thy Maxim,' said a card he carried in his wallet […]), and yet, because of his shyness, which made his approaches circuitous, he repeatedly found himself doing exactly that.

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.