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

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

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

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.

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.

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.