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.

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.

I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

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

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