Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.

Your soul sings to mine. My soul is yours, and it always will be, in any world.

You can't beat yourself up anymore, ' he says. 'And you can't compare your thing to my thing or to anyone else's thing on the how-bad-should-I-feel? scale.

If we are at peace with this world, it may be because we have sold out to it and compromised with it.

Nobody ever kills everybody anywhere, big man. Somebody always gets away.

We need help from above if we are to make progress in our journeys.

Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.