The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.
Irving Babbitt

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.
Irving Babbitt

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.
Irving Babbitt

The humanities need to be defended to-day against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
Irving Babbitt

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
Irving Babbitt

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.
Irving Babbitt

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Irving Babbitt

The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.
Irving Babbitt

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.
Irving Babbitt

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
Irving Babbitt

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.
Irving Babbitt

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
Irving Babbitt

We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
Irving Babbitt

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
Irving Babbitt