Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?

No,' Foyle roared. 'Let them hear this. Let them hear everything.'You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children.'Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?'What are you talking about?'Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open.' Foyle laughed savagely. 'I've ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I've blown that last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on.... No more telling the children what's best for them to know.... Let 'em all grow up. It's about.

Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists].

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than 'politicians' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.