Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.