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 importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and 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.

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