"I've come to you this morning with
a topic that probably in an earlier age would have sounded a little bit absurd.
And that’s the question of whether character matters, whether it has anything to
do with public service."
"Now even as recently as a generation ago, probably
no one would give a commencement talk on that address to educated people -- people
getting their degree -- because education was considered to be not only the
acquisition of knowledge, but the formation of moral character. That's what
education was all about."
"
As a matter of fact, the president of Harvard
University, until the middle of the last century, personally taught the courses in
ethics. Every college in America before the twentieth century was started by
Christians, with one exception, the University of South Carolina. Even when I
was at Brown in the 1950's, chapel was mandatory."
"Thank God for institutions like
Geneva, where you still care about educating people not only in the
mind but in the conscience and in the moral education and formation as well."
"What was Socrates and his interlocutors trying to discover in the great classic
of philosophy called, The
Republic? What was the question? Simple
question: 'What is justice? And, Is it better to appear
just or to be just?'"
