Taking all that was best in the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great … - John Senior

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Taking all that was best in the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones—and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of Newman's "gentleman." Anyone working at college, whether in the pure arts and sciences or the practical ones, will discover he has made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him: he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered. (Appendix)

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About John Senior

John Senior (1923 - 1999) was an American Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics, teaching at Bard and Hofstra Colleges, the Universities of Wyoming and Kansas, and Cornell. He co-founded the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at Kansas.

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The restoration of reason presupposes the restoration of love, and we can only love what we know because we have first touched, tasted, smelled, heard and seen. From that encounter with exterior reality, interior responses naturally arise, movements motivating, urging, releasing energies, infinitely greater than atoms, of intelligence and will. Without these motives, thought and action are aimless, sometimes random, more frequently mechanical, having an order but a tyrannical order, that is, an order imposed from without. (Ch. 1)

I believe it is imprudent to document the disaster quite so much as some of us have. By publishing his achievements you give the Devil more than his due. The question is what can be done—what can and what must be done, because there isn't any choice. (Ch. 1)

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