Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies ….

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

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….

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….

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….

The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of sign….

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….

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 ….

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

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men wit….

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

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..

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….

In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or ….

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan..

The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche..

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do..

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesqu….

The intellectual's ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of ….