The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.

No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman.

[On Hollywood:] America's greatest achievement.

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.