Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

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

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.

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

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.

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.