"Rebuilding Democratic Consensus – At Home and Abroad"
26-28 June 2023
[Est.1993]

Christopher Walker, Vice President, Studies and Analysis, National Endowment for Democracy (Washington DC), 5 MAR - [Est.1998]

[Est.2015]

[Est. 2013]

"It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life – these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge, they are the objects of a University. 

[...] A University is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge."

"To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; (...) to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; (...) to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; (...) to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural [as opposed to feudal] aristocracy."