The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
