Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.