Extended excerpt [Nonfiction]:

“The principle of the studium generale is that civilization has been a continual gift of the creator spirit; it consists of inventions, discoveries, insights, art works, highly theorized institutions, and methods of workmanship. All of this has vastly accumulated over the ages and become very unwieldy, yet, in the spirit, it is always appropriable. As Socrates would have said, it’s meaning can be recalled. The advantage of recalling it is that we are then not enslaved to it, we are citizens, and we again have it available as our own. Consider. It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.” (pp. 174-175)

Source: Library – The Community of Scholars (1962) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 64082522

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction]:

“The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues; and spontaneity and sexuality are not powers of the simple but of human health.” (p. 27)

Source: Library – Compulsory Mis-Education (1964) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 269371

Extended excerpt [Nonfiction]:

“We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit. We don’t get the shelter and education because not enough mind is paid to those things. Naturally the system is inefficient; the overhead is high; the task is rarely done with love, style, and excitement, for such beauties emerge only from absorption in real objects; sometimes the task is not done at all; and those who could do it best become either cynical or resigned.” (p. xiii)

Source: Library – Growing Up Absurd (1960|2012 New York Review Book edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-1-59017-581-1

Extended excerpt [Full paragraph cited]:

“Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.”

Source: Library – Growing Up Absurd (1960|2012 New York Review Book edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-1-59017-581-1