"The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment."

"Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics."

"The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system."

"Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button."

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."

"Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down, and that's going to attract the wrong kind of guy, and it's serious. It's serious business."

"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died."

"The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home."