Education is the movement from darkness to light..

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication..

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice..

Every age is blind to its own worst madness..

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the s….

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration..

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such l….

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

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the conde….

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

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

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..

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that m….

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

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its ….

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competenc….

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principl….

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 wo….

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment..

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….

The self is the modern substitute for the soul..