Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

If you need a handbook for praise and worship, read Psalms.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

Whether you like it or not - I want to close the Dutch borders.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

What artists have accomplished is realizing there's only a small amount of stuff that's important and then seeing what it was.

Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.

Frankly, I'm tired of the powerful getting away with all kinds of stuff. Hillary [Clinton] didn't win - and, folks, there are ways without an actual prosecution.