The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.