"The problem, it seems to me, is largely the invasion of the academic and intellectual world by militant groups who do not bother to study enough to know what they are dealing with, but who still define their positions in terms of political agendas. These political agendas have the goal of belonging to a redemptive group: 'we save our souls because we believe in what is good, and we spy everywhere on these toxic bodies that prevent us from obtaining what is due to us.'"
"And all these new causes have the same foundation. They are causes made for people who want to feel excluded from the established order, which must therefore be overthrown in order to give themselves a place at the top of it. Once at the top, they will then reorganize it in such a way as to purify it of all these old and corrupting influences which have had too much importance up to now. I think that this invasion of political activism in the universities and in the Humanities and in all sectors of civilization is one of the great catastrophes of our time.
« But it didn’t have to be. We don’t have to listen to these people. We don’t have to get lost in these show trials, these letters of denunciation or these kinds of witch hunts that ostracize people. These activists only win when we align ourselves with their methods.. We don't have to fall into line. It's entirely possible to step back and even laugh at some of these things. […] Stay calm and say: There are other points of view besides yours. You may have a valid argument, but it is not the only valid argument. Let's sit down and discuss it. [...] And when people try to radicalize and politicize university programs and teaching, you don't have to accept it. You can even laugh about it. It is still legally permissible to make fun of people in our country and in our civilization. After all, comedy is one of the great gifts of civilization."
"People who consider themselves intellectuals or thinkers also consider themselves, in a way, outside the community. They judge it, believing themselves to be endowed with superior vision and intelligence, so they are inevitably critical of everything ordinary people do to survive. We have created an intellectual class that by nature does not identify with the ways of life around them and tries to acquire another kind of identity through its criticism."
“When I ended up teaching in Eastern Europe, my main idea was that what the young people there needed was not just philosophy, but a whole range of knowledge that had been excluded from the official curriculum, such as knowledge of history, knowledge of literature, knowledge of the relationships between these things: how music and art and literature contribute to the vision of a society, and then of course knowledge of the religious traditions of their country. All of these things had been excluded from national identity by the Communist Party. But they have also been excluded from our societies, by the universities themselves. Most young people today come out of university having studied history without really knowing anything about it. They know about the periods of revolutionary struggle, and all this stuff that interests their teachers, who maintain their own glory, but they know nothing about the things that have made up the spirit of the people.”