Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: "Are you telling me it's wrong to anthropomorphize people?" (quoted by Daniel Dennett) - Sidney Morgenbesser

When challenged why he had written so little, he fired back: "Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?"

During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone, "Yeah, yeah."

A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God. "Why is God making me suffer so much?" he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?"