My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a hardening, or… - Robert Maynard Hutchins

There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader: he can never fully comprehend it. That is why these books are great teachers; they demand the attention of the reader and keep his intelligence on the stretch.

The rise of experimental science has not made the Great Conversation irrelevant. ... Science itself is part of the Great Conversation.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western tradition.