To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.

[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound.

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.