If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

People always sound so proud when they announce they know nothing of music.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

Freedom costs you a great deal.