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Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary.

— Noel Annan, Baron Annan

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More quotes by Noel Annan, Baron Annan

Nostalgia, however, is the mother of loyalty.

Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. For the most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories.

Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society.

Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party."

The diminished respect for authority brought about by the spread of egalitarianism, the multiplicity of choice and styles of life which greater affluence has made possible, the belief in the value of modernity, and the expansion of curiosity and interest, these seem to me to be the main forces which have disintegrated the old cultural pattern.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Noel Annan, Baron Annan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.