Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.

A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

I write to discover what I think.