“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.”

“for now, bread and mead call us, appetites whetted, to witness what I have been nursing, encased in iron, licked by flame, and tended with relish.”

“The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. . . In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; any nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time.”

“The movie creaked along, obvious and mediocre plot. Mediocre script, mediocre music. They ought to have sealed the thing in a time capsule and marked "Late 20th Century Mediocrity" and buried it somewhere.”

“I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

“Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.”