Philosopher

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can, in turn, be a blessing to society.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.