The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

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.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems

Beware of the man who's extraordinary claims end in a sales pitch.

Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs.

ideas are dangerous commodities.

Forget the idea that inspiration will come to you like a flash of lightning. It's much more about hard graft.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

You can work hard, do everything that you think is right, but one thing you'll never overcome in life is fate. You can't control fate.

Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.