Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good,…

Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a …

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Remember, America: organization will set you free.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.