The Closing of the American Mind Quotes
Nonfiction books, Philosophical works
Top Quotes
“… the casuistry of weakness …”
“The issue is what is the social science atom.”
“Man is the problem, and we live with various stratagems for not facing it.”
“We now take what were only interpretations of our souls to be facts about them.”
“They [students] learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything.”
“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil.”
“Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.””
“The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.”
“There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.”
“The students [of the 60’s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents’ conspicuous consumption.”
“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.”
“The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.”
“We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us...”
“Ancient political philosophy was almost entirely in the service of philosophy, of making the world safer for philosophy.”
“Reason is only one part of the soul’s economy and requires a balance of the other parts in order to function properly.”
“Students are not in a position to know the pleasures of reason; they can only see it as a disciplinary and repressive parent.”
“Gide … latches on to Nietzsche’s immoralism for the sake of leveling bourgeois sexual morals, using a cannon to kill a gnat.”
“Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans.”
“There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.”
“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.”