There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

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

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

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

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

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

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.