The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

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

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

Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.