"As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people."

“Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth.”

“Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning.”

“The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them.”

“Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.”

“Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself.”

“Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question.”