A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.