Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.