With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.