The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

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

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.