“The same policy that led us, in countries like Poland, to champion the rights of the ordinary Poles, led us, in countries like Vietnam, to outdo the communists themselves at exterminating the peasantry. It became a monstrosity, that policy.”

Portrait of a New York intellectual

“Historical events as vast as the overthrow of world communism can be analyzed on a cosmic scale, the way astronomers study the universe by peering at whole galaxies. Or they can be analyzed in miniature, by focusing on a molecule”

“Just as the gospels and Pauline writings were the Bible of Christianity in the past, so 'Leaves of Grass' would be the Bible of Cosmic civilization in the future”

“Village radicalism wasn’t a worker’s movement, not really. It was a bohe­mian movement with working-class sympa­thies ... a species of radical bohemianism that ought to be called, after its finest ex­positor, John Reedism.”