If Bach is not in Heaven, I am not going!

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all.

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.