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.

Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.