It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him.

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.

If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.

Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.

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.

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.

To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.

The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.

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

there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy

...books were better than travel.

How could you expect people to treat you well, when you don't treat yourself right?

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

I'm more selective now I've got a family. I don't want to work all the time. My daughter's 12; I don't want to miss out on her life. Soon she'll be a teenager; she won't want me around.

Dietrich would never do that

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both...Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both.

The key thing to understand is that solar activity causes shifts in the jet stream with consequent changes in weather patterns and triggers processes that lead to storm formation.

Blowin' up is nothing to me.

Capital simply allows us to expend labour in advance.