Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

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

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

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.

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

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

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.