“Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.”

“Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.”

“Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".”

“Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.”

“How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”

“To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.”

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”