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.
From Allan Bloom
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.
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.
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
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.
The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
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?
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.
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