A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

... to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.