When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Providence knows best.

I was a handful growing up.

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.

Just after Kim Jong Il's death, the official news agency put out an article saying that under Kim Jong Il's rule, the people had been like naive children without a care in the world.

I feel that I have grown so much as an actor being on 'Homeland'.

I love going to the hair salon. I'm Spanish. I think it's more of a Latina thing to go to the hair salon.

People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.

I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible