Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?