The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.