“To go for liberal arts meant becoming that vague, mysterious entity, a 'liberal arts type'--the kind of person who in all likelihood would never successfully occupy any particular position in society, and who in the end would just vanish in a puff of smoke.”

“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”

“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”

“...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?”

“Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”