Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

One must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.