The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

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

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.