I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we no longer need politics.

Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation's leaders wouldn't know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return.