America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.