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..

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practi….

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical..

The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degr….

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

It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged….

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all it….

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

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 ….

The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestan….

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 s….

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

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….

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

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one..

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 para….

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption..

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the pow….

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury..

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual "in a situation he has not known for a g….

We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- "the tradition of the new." Yesterdays ava….