Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

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

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

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.

Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.