“In later life most good things happen very slowly; only bad things tend to happen fast.”

“The presence of God compelled human[s] to quest for an ideal. They had to strive for something to win God's blessing.... Nietzsche feared that with God's passing even that striving would stop. No one would think it worthwhile to try to overcome himself. People who would live happily with their own limitations.... Worse was life in which humanity had lost all interest in ideals. This was the world epitomized by "The Last Man." This creature hops and blinks on the Earth's crust, small and self-seeking, lives with the most pitiable credo: `One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: Both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.' The Last Man has his `little poison now and then: That makes for agreeable dreams'; he is cautious, self-absorbed, noncommittal.... What happens now and in the future if our most intelligent students never learn to strive to overcome what they are?”

“[Steven] King is an entertainment. King is a diversion. But when you try to take him as a guide to life, he won't work. The circles he draws on the deep are weak and irresolute. And this is so in part because King...is a sentimental writer. In his universe, the children...are good, right, just and true.... But bring this way of seeing the world out into experience and you'll pretty quickly pay for it. Your relation to large quadrants of experience...will likely be paranoid and fated to fail....”

“Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go.”

“The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate... The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an "alienated majesty”

“And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.”

“Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.”