“Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.”

“But that's part of faith. Believing and knowing despite what other people say, and despite what the world might think of your beliefs.”

“Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.”

“The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

“The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness or who make “democracy” synonymous with a republican form of government?”

“Everything we know, believe, want, fear, and hope for, our thinking tells us. It follows, then, that the quality of our thinking is the primary determinant of the quality of our lives.”