"The Closing of the American Mind" Quotes

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

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.

Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

The freedom of man in society is to have a thing and to act upon it. The freedom of a man in business is to have a thing and to trade it. The freedom of a man in the academe is to have a thought and to express it - but he cannot express it without having it.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

The American student is therefore as much a consumer of education as he is a student. And education is a consumer item like any other.

There is no real teaching without the personal presence of the teacher.

The most recent form of the disease is the belief that there is no truth; that all is merely relative.

The university is not a right. It is a privilege, a luxury, a place to gain knowledge, not to have rights, social or political or sexual.

Teaching has to be restored to what it was originally - the transmission of the highest things.