On a more biographical note, the philosopher of the “I and Thou” allowed very few people to call him by his first name; the theorist of education suffered no disturbance of his rigorous schedule by children playing in his own home; the utopian politician alienated most representatives of the Zionist establishment; and the innovative academic lecturer barely found a permanent position in the university he had helped to create—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of the most dedicated students of this inspiring orator and writer found themselves irritated by the conflict between their master’s ideas and their own attempts at putting them into practice. In the final analysis it seems as if Buber always remained the well-groomed, affected, prodigiously gifted, pampered Viennese boy, displaced in a land of horses and chemists, whose best company were the works of his own imagination and whose self-staging overtures to the outside world were always tainted by his enthusiasm for words and for the heightened tone of his own prodigious voice.

Michael Zank and Zachary Braiterman, “Martin Buber”