“In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.”

“consistent affection for his characters is what sets Tolstoy apart. Flaubert is equally objective, he says, but Flauberts objectivity is charged with irritability and Tolstoys with affection. For F...”

“Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”

“Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanshi...”

“At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsificati...”

“We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.”

“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawns rel...”

“We having so much fun together!! 'through nature..through people..through religion...through culture..through friendship...we manage to learn something that lead to a better relationship among huma...”

“Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here...”

“Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of politica...”

“The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to th...”