A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.

In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.

Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.

The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.