Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

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.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.