The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

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

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

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

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

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.