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

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.

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.

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

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

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