You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.