The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.