Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

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

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.