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 surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.
Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man’s well-being they were providing rights for themselves.
Intellectuals advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.
This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures…They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.
Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.
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 facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.
