Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.

I never ponder counterfactuals.

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human.