Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

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.

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

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

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.