The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.

Where a generation ago people felt entitled to a chance at education, they now feel entitled to the credential affirming that they have completed a course of study regardless of their actual mastery.

In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian.

Opportunity does not need to be exactly equal. It needs only to exist. For the talented and motivated, that will be enough...The vital thing is not to maximize everyone's performance, but to ensure maximal performance from the most talented, the ones who can make a difference.

A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

The fact is that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.

The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.