If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.

It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.

Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear.

Sanctimony is the most inexpensive form of morality. It costs us nothing to make much of small matters in others.

My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.

I have also been attacked by my opponents as someone seeking to purge university faculties of leftist professors. This is false. The first provision of the Academic Bill of Rights is that no professor should be hired or fired because of his or her political views. I have never myself called for the firing of any professor for his or her political views, nor would I.

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.