There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

In all life 

one should comfort the afflicted, 

but verily, also, 

one should afflict the comfortable, 

and especially when 

they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; 

that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

War remains the decisive human failure.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. 

That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, 

let them not be written upon the heart. 

The spirit should never grow old.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas 

but the march of events.

The conventional view 

serves to protect us 

from the painful job 

of thinking.