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.

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.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.

The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

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

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.