We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about...

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the...

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he...

If you say you’re a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I’m a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn’t...

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word ‘Orwellian’...

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and...

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and...

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport...

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. ‘My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United...

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

No se trata de que sean ironías de la historia, sino de que la propia historia es irónica. No es que no existan certezas, sino que existe la absoluta certeza de que no hay certezas....

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust’s reply was ‘To be separated from Mama.’) I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be...

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour...

1. Bangladesh…. In 1971 … Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan…. This...

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is […] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was...

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and ‘experience’ to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much...

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They...

At a certain point talk about ‘essence’ and ‘oneness’ and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who...

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: ‘Only if I did not know that I was doing...

There either is a god or there is not; there is a ‘design’ or not.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would...

What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that...

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think ‘first woman president.’ We think—for example—’first ex-co-president’ or ‘first wife of...

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

Should I, too, prefer the title of ‘non-Jewish Jew’? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde...

Beware what you wish for, unless you have the grace to hope that your luck can be shared.

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the ‘Cold War,’ and was firm in its belief that that Soviet...

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite...

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.