“Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning… — Louis Menand Copy Share
We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
“For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
“In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective. — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
“We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is… — Louis Menand Copy Share
Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate. — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
“[According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if… — Louis Menand Copy Share
Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students… — Louis Menand Copy Share Image
![“[According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/656/louis-menand-8583_death_according-to-holmes-every-year-if-not-ev_403601.jpg)
