The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you’ve had a prior training in book culture.

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it’s grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there...

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia’s neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today’s bland daytime soaps.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life’s goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah,...

A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.

A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on ‘All My Children’ when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands...

I’m very pro-American – my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.

Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.

I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal,...

Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn’t expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional...

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.

As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English – the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish...

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan’s bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory – he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.

The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of...

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.

Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman.

I don’t go to New York. I don’t go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My career is 28 years in an obscure art school, with limited staff and no perks....

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer...

If colleges and universities are really concerned about women’s rights, then they must adjust to a far more flexible structure to allow young women students to take leaves of absence if they want to have...

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the...

When anything goes, it’s women who lose.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women’s movement of the late...

Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon...

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.

Sotomayor’s vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as ‘a wise Latina’ trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment – a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

I want young women when they’re 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives.

I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed....

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

I’ve been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style – her toughness and rigor.

‘Mad Men’ doesn’t capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.

Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with...

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions – which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.