7 quotes
True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)
The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.
English and the Discipline of Ideas (1920)