Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.