The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.