16 quotes
It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual or moral effort whatsoever. … Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noesos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)
We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds—either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.
Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968)