A telling example of what it has all come to can be found in the person of Rick Santorum, the junior Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Elected to the House in 1990 and then the Senate...

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.

The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or...

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and ”mangled mind” leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it

Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It’s a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits

How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter!...

Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation.