It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

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

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

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

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.