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.

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.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Sure I think it is healthy to speak the truth, and be who you are, and be proud of that.

The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.

It's a lot easier to tell the truth usually.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle - among others - that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

The truth is more important than the facts.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

The unions claim the deck is stacked against them when it comes to labor laws, but the truth is many private and public sector workers are forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, yet they have little say in how the unions spend their money.