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

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

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.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

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

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.

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