Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

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

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

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.

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