"We live in a time of rush. This is reflected high and low. Low: contemporary societies have little or no time for metaphysical pondering. High: even the privileged, academic philosopher is often caught in the hurry, too harried by professional obligations to have enough time or inclination to think. We risk the seduction of what I will call 'thought-bites': positions ready prepared for speed reading, prepackaged for mental digestion. Our quick attention to ideas, more or less familiar, offers a satisfaction but this is short-lived. Little nourished, we seek the stimulus of more quick 'thought-bites' to keep the hunger of spirit at bay."

- William Desmond

Berlioz: "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."

Alexander the Weightless: "i ets wht i m n wht i m iz mnm"

Aristides the Aristocrat: "Fast food for thoughtlessness--who would have thought it would go down so fast or so soon reduce whole cultures to a tabula rasa? Thinking requires time, but time itself requires Eternity. We now more than ever need ideas that can bite the mind, that can digest mind itself; the only ideas real enough to do so are the Eternal Ideas. We need to learn, as Eliot wrote some decades ago, how to sit still--that the Eternal might come to rest in us, in our restless ever-distracted hearts. Then, and only then, would heart and mind be ready to sustain that which is both timely and timeless; timely because it is Timeless. Learning how to sit still and how late the time is demands of us latecomers that we begin to perceive Eternal Ideas, and perceive the distinction between, say, the mundane "idea" of sitting still and the Eternal Idea of Eternity. Only Eternal Ideas, their reality and living substance, can transcend the speed of time, thereby slowing and eventually stilling both time and the racing mind; while the Idea of Eternity Itself can open mind to the fullness of thoughtfulness and mindfulness. Then, and then only, is individual mind brought to Eternal Mind, individual heart to Eternal Heart. This is Philosophy, the Art of Sitting-Still amongst motion and commotion, while knowing the world of difference it makes."

[Desmond, William. BEYOND HEGEL AND DIALECTIC: SPECULATION, CULT, AND COMEDY. State University of New York Press, 1992.]

"To avoid misunderstanding: it seems to me that conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something--the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new."

- Hannah Arendt (1961)

Chesterton (1924): "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."

Chesterton (1925): "It is obviously most unjust that the old believer should be forbidden to teach his old beliefs, while the new believer is free to teach his new beliefs."

Chesterton (1932): "The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions."

Alexander the Weightless: "spk nglsh y dnchya th nu's whr zt"

Aristides the Aristocrat: "Education and tradition are crucially linked. Without tradition, education has no idea where it has come from and hence no idea where it is going. Without education, tradition remains a dead rather than a living abstraction capable of informing the soul, not with information, but with the love of learning. The dead bestow old wisdom on the new, and the living in turn bestow new life on the old."

[Arendt, Hannah. "The Crisis in Education." In her BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: EIGHT EXERCISES IN POLITICAL THOUGHT, Viking Press, 1961.]

"As teachers in the humane studies, our sacred world must remain the book. No, not the book: the page. We teachers are the people of the page--and not only of a page of words but of numbers and of notes. To get inside a page of Haydn, of Freud, of Weber, of James: only so can our students be possessed by an idea of what it means to study. Music, philosophy, the literature of human conduct in cases or fictions, mathematics, I suppose all disciplines of theory, are visions of the highest formalities; the visionary disciplines are what we should require of our undergraduates; then, at least, they may acquire a becoming modesty about becoming 'problem-solvers', dictating reality. Such disciplines would teach us, as teachers, that it would be better to spend three days imprisoned by a sentence than any length of time handing over ready-made ideas."

- Philip Rieff (1973)

Shakespeare: "... the Liberal Arts without a parallel."

Alexander the Weightless: "lik i sz my twitr cn dew it"

Aristides the Aristocrat: "The T-shirt logo and bumper-sticker and sound-bite mentality now completely dominate democratic public discourse, pundits no less than the hoi polloi. All social classes, the so-called elites included, speak telegraphically. A word or phrase, a non-sentence, a page and even a book of non-sentences is supposed to convey significant meaning, but usually only conveys the emptiness of the mind or mouth touting it. It's as if robots thought they were communicating by pushing each other's buttons, while seemingly overnight the Temple of Learning is no more."

[Rieff,Philip. FELLOW TEACHERS, Harper & Row, 1973.]

"The discovery of the current of history is the classic panacea of our good intellectuals and thinkers; indeed, it was the happiest day of their lives. The disappearance of the Eternal Father from our mental horizon had left a large void. The situation was becoming impossible, the universe and our lives seemed incomprehensible, we had neither compass nor sextant nor Ariadne's clue nor radar. Everything was getting out of control. Then, all of a sudden, the thread of history was discovered. If we take one end of the thread and pull, the whole ball of world history, past and future, unrolls in order, very nicely, at our disposal. What mastery, gentlemen! Much stronger than the shamans! Much stronger than all the theologians! We can see where we are going, so we know what we have to do."

- Jacques Ellul

Dicta of the Common Wisdom: "Follow the current of history"; "Keep in step with the times"; "Be on the side of progress"; "Change is necessary"; "History will be the judge"; "You're going against the Zeitgeist"; "You're being reactionary"; "You can't turn back the clock"; "This is the 21st Century!"

Bach: "What the world / contains / Must vanish like smoke."

Alexander the Weightless: "hoo nedz hisstree whn i kn twittr? go wth th flo, man! thts th wav uv th Dow!"

Aristides the Aristocrat: "Keeping up with the latest technology of the Joneses is the opiate of the masses; keeping up with Historical Determinism the opiate of the educated and intellectual classes. Never dare look at things or the world sub specie aeternitatis."

[Ellul, Jacques. A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW COMMONPLACES, 1968 (1st pub., 1966).]

"Higher education has a loud voice in the media, a strong arm in parliament, and a free hand in the public purse. It is one of the most powerful vested interests in the modern state, and better able than most to give proof of its indispensability. Those who wish to clip the tree of learning, to prune its rotting branches, or merely to question the general value of a growth whose shade seems so lethal to every rival interest are, to those who live from the fruit of the tree, the rudest of rude barbarians."

- Roger Scruton (1985)

Proverb: "Knowledge has bitter roots but sweet fruits."

Alexander the Weightless: "Dey sez I keps barfin' up a rawng tre!"

Aristides the Aristocrat: "Lop off the branches of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, then call what still stands the Tree of Learning; saw down the trunk of knowledge and call what remains the Stump of Self-Approval; dig out the root of philosophy, then call yourself a Radical. Such are ever the lumberingly fruitless, rootless reforms in education."

[Scruton, Roger. "The End of Education" (1985). In his UNTIMELY TRACTS, St. Martin's Press, 1987.]

"In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads--in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and enforced from within."

- Jacques Barzun

Voltaire: "Decadence was brought about by doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, by a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre."

Alexander the Weightless: "2 mnee bg wrds, 2 mch spling."

Aristides the Aristocrat: "In the 60s we were all Sartreans, in the 70s Levi-Straussians, in the 80s Foucauldians, in the 90s Derrideans. Now we are all Alexandrians, but now without any character or force within to fall away from."

[Barzun, Jacques. "Look It Up! Check It Out!" (1986). In his THE CULTURE WE DESERVE, Wesleyan University Press, 1989.]