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.

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

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

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.

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?

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

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.

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.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

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

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

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.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre Columbian archeology not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

The real community of man in the midst of all the self contraditory simulacra of community is the community of those who seek the truth of potential knowers... of all men to the extent that they know.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition it is dead.

One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

That friend a great man's ruin strongly checks, who rails into his belief all his defects.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

It is my belief that one's salary is between an individual and the IRS.

It is my belief that we all have the need to feel special. It is this need that can bring out the best in us, yet the worst in us.

I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me.

The truth is that relative income is not directly related to happiness. Nonpartisan social-survey data clearly show that the big driver of happiness is earned success: a person's belief that he has created value in his life or the life of others.

Effective use of Braille is as important to the blind as independent mobility, knowledge in the use of adaptive technology, and the core belief that equality, opportunity and security are truly possible for all people who are blind.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print.

If we are going to save this country, if we are going to reestablish that belief in God, it's up to us. If we don't do it, who will?

It's a short step from the belief that every child should be wanted to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants.

My parents gave me stability and a belief in myself and in all the possibilities life has to offer. I was told the only limitations I would ever face were those I placed upon myself.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

We have good security. It's hard to get in here. Barring a tactical entry where terrorists come in and hold us hostage, that's about the only thing that could possibly warrant me carrying a gun in the clubhouse. That's highly unlikely, and I admit that. But my personal belief is I don't want to suffer from the poor choices of others.

The scientific and scholarly community is marked by the belief that the truth is to be found in all; none can claim it as their monopoly.

Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.

It is my hope and my belief that you will be able to report that I died with dignity, without animal fear and without bravado. I owe that much to myself.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

The belief in immortality has always seemed cowardly to me. When very young I learned that all things die, and all that we wish of good must be won on this earth or not at all.