Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.

contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.

Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.

The South is the region that history has happened to.

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.