It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.