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….

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..

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….

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

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….

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

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

Education is the movement from darkness to light..

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….

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

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….

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..

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions….

Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurp….

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..

The self is the modern substitute for the soul..

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

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 ….