When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.
Remember that it is 'free-thinking Jews,' not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in .
Consider the great . is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canon...
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you prov...
It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are...
Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.
Actually, the leap of faith—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a leap that can be made once and for all. It is...
His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses:...
Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identit...
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].
Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the...
Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always...
Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.