I see the pain on your face when you say the word intellectual, because it has so many syllables in it. - Clive James

Probably it is only in free countries, however, that a humorous regard for corruption is possible. In the totalitarian countries, corrupt from top to bottom, nobody is laughing because nothing is laughable. There is no difference between what things are and what things ought to be, since what things ought to be no longer exists even as a standard.

In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

Taste was his world. Rilke behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.