“Yale’s greatness carries an urgent need to guard against the fall of excellence into exclusivity, of refinement into preciousness, of elegance into class and convention.”

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind….

To take the measure of oneself by reference to one’s colleagues leads to envy or complacency rather than constructive self-examination.

Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government – but the reverse… If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom.

Attitudes on campuses often presage tendencies in the larger society. If that is so with respect to freedom of expression, the erosion of principle we have seen throughout our society in recent years may be only the beginning.

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

Maybe that is the best lesson I learned in my first semester at Yale, because if I had gone to a less-demanding school and continued to sail along on the top, I am sure I would never have attained the subsequent achievements in my life.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

I have a master’s from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this.

To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.