One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

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

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

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.