All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?