Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

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

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

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.

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

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.

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.