Professor:

"In the absence of … faith … we govern by tenderness.  It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory.  When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."  --  Flannery O'Connor, introduction to 

 "We can't go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café.  I've no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can't be done."  --  Colonel Plum, in Evelyn Waugh, 

Professor:

“It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken possession of their mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs every other co

Professor:

“With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs.

Professor:

Nobody in his right mind likes to discuss his own idiocies.  But because we are all in danger of being idiots, sometimes we owe it to each other to do so.

Professor: