We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

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.

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

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.

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

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.