People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame.

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.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.

The leading cause of death is birth.

The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.