The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'