Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.