Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

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?

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

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

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.