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

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

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.