Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

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.'

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

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

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.