I recall very sharply how, in the autumn of 1939, as I was driving one afternoon across the monotonous prairies of Texas to begin my third year in his post, it came to me like a revelation that...I did not have to go on professing the clichés of liberalism which were becoming meaningless to me. I saw that my opinions had been formed out of a timorous regard for what was supposed to be intellectually respectable, and that I had always been looking over my shoulder to find out what certain others, whose concern with truth I was beginning to believe to be not very intense, were doing or thinking. It is a great experience to wake up at a critical juncture to the fact that one does have a free will, and that giving up the worship of false idols is a quite practicable proceeding.

--Richard M. Weaver