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

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.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

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.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.