For every wicked witch there is, in our cluture, a black magician, an alchemist, a Flying Dutchman, a Doctor Strangelove, a Vincent Price. The scientist, like the magician, possesses secrets. A secret - expertise - is somehow perceived as antidemocratic, and therefore ought to be unnatural. We have come a long way from Prometheus to Faust to Frankenstein. And even Frankenstein's monster is now a joke.

There are too many ironies in the fire!

Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a …

Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.

'If we don't play god, who will?'

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.