There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.

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.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.