The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.

What is a political party but a conspiracy?

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

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.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.