“The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead”

“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.”

“The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.”

“A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy. ”

“Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.”

“The transgression of Adam and Eve was not in learning the difference between good and evil but in treating the knowledge they received as something that was, literally, internal to them-a food that could be seized, devoured, and controlled by the individual.”