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

Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.

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.

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.

Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.

The member of a culture ... purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. ... He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.

Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments. At the same time that man attempts to straighten a crooked nature, he is striving to annihilate space, which seems but another phase of the war against substance. We ignore the fact that space and matter are shock absorbers; the more we diminish them the more we reduce our privacy and security.