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.

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

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

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.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

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.