All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.