We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.

The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.