Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case and the Oppenheimer hearings; certainly one saw it in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.