"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.]