Leon Wieseltier

“The task of the intellectual is not to be liked, but to be right.”

“Sentimentality is a refusal to think.”

“Clarity is a moral quality.”

“The past is not a foreign country. It is the country of our origins.”

“A library is an archive of hopes.”

“The first casualty of an ideologue is nuance.”

“The pursuit of happiness is a red herring. It is a foolish and a destructive goal. The proper goal of life is the pursuit of goodness.”

“Love is a form of knowledge.”

“The Internet is the greatest instrument of forgetting ever invented.”

“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be pondered.”

“A culture is not a matter of taste, but of conviction.”

“Irony is the glory of slaves.”

“The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything you want, and nothing you need.”

“To be a serious person means to be a person with a sense of the tragic.”

“Technology is the new religion, and it has one god: the self.”