Leon Wieseltier Quotes

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy.

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

The world invited me many places.

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty.

The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.