It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.

Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost.

Until the world perceives that "good" cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and "bad" because it is another's, there is no prospect of realizing community.

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.

The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners; the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought.

One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.