...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.