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

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.

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

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

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