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

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

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

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.

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

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.