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.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

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.

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

The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.