The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

If you want wise lessons, ask wise questions. The type of questions you often ask tells the kind of person you are.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.

...things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible.

Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

The spiritual journey has to do with learning to think more deeply and take as long a time as we need. That's the path to wisdom.

Trousers can never be too tight. You have to go through a couple of days of pain, then everything stretches out.

Small churches become more effective when they specialize in what they do best.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.