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

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

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

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.

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.