Taking all that was best in the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones—and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of Newman's "gentleman." Anyone working at college, whether in the pure arts and sciences or the practical ones, will discover he has made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him: he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered.

The Death of Christian Culture (1977)