One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.

... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.