American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.