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

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

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

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

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

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.