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.

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.

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.

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

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

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.

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.