I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.

Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.