The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

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

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

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

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.