A professor is not one who knows, but one who professes to know, and [thus] is constantly in the position of inviting challenge. . . . He professes publicly where everyone is invited to come and challenge, [and] at any time he must be willing and able to defend it openly against all comers. The degree is originally a chivalric device-a gauntlet of defiance to all rivals-and not a safe rampart or dug-out for a scholar to hide behind in safe immunity from any challenge.

True knowledge never shuts the door on more knowledge, but zeal often does.

The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is not what became of the Nephites but what the Nephites became.

It is throwing our life away, to think of the wrong things.

All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.

Man's dominion is a call to service, not a license to to exterminate.

At UCLA I quickly learned the knack of getting grades, a craven surrender to custom, since grades had little to do with learning.