If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.

...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.