From the Preface to the Beacon Press Edition:
"The conviction underlying this book is that as many persons as possible should do the thinking. Too few now recognize their responsibility. The age of science is an age of experts. It is also, judging by what most people say about themselves, an age of ignorance."
"Liberal education can never be quite perfect, since it is ideal but at any given time it is good in proportion to the clarity with which it is conceived and the effort which that clarity inspires. One unmistakable sign that it is good is that opinion flourishes and argument goes on: argument, that is to say about the greatest things, the difficult, the all but insoluble things that haunt us every morning as we wake. An unmistakable sign of its lapse would be a general disposition to leave things to those who are understood as specializing in them. The best time for a free society is the time when everybody believes it makes a difference what he thinks and knows; and the accent should be at last on knows. The only insurance against disaster is knowledge, widely diffused."
"The surest proof that any mind is free is its faith in itself when faced with hard questions. It may not be sure that it can solve them, but it does not doubt its capacity to make the attempt."
"The most it [liberal education] claims is that it prepares the intellect to search for it and to recognize it when or if it is available."
"Liberal education, by introducing him to precision on many fronts, can make him at home with the intellect at its happiest, even though most of its masters are dead. To him they will not be dead; and to that extent his own life increases, for he knows how to think of every great mind as his contemporary. He is prepared then to add to the whole glory if he can. But he is only prepared. The fruits of a liberal education are still to come. Yet they will not come unless the preparation is precise."
[Chapter 1: Nobody Thinks He is Educated]
"The true enemy is within us and will eat on there until our hollowness of heart and head can by some miracle be cured. Not a day passes but education is told that it fights from the last ditch." (4)
"The world is in such a sore state that education would be its nurse if it could. It too knows pity; it is by ancient tradition one of the healing arts. Yet it can be pardoned for responding with bewilderment to the demand that it medicine at once a sick society. Its supreme artist, Socrates, called himself a midwife; but he ministered to one man at a time." (4)
"All educators are well-intentioned, but few of them reflect upon their intentions." (5)
