Quotes from Joseph Epstein

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud—whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths—is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises.

When I say that democracy has no place in the university, I mean that the university is, or at any rate was and ought still to be, a hierarchical institution, as befits an elite enterprise. The hierarchy is based upon scholarly and scientific accomplishment. The accomplishment makes for authority.

Each university president has merely kept the pot boiling without noticing what wretched fare was cooking inside it. None has prevented or even slowed any of the continuing rot of the humanities and social sciences within their institution, nor even thought to do so.

The Greeks took envy to be part of human nature, running at differing intensities in differing people, but always there, ever ready to emerge, like a coiled snake, seemingly asleep but easily stirred into poisonous attack.

Comrade" was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one's friend in the forthcoming (it hasn't quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn't about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word "friend.

The problem is that Sontag wasn't sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.

The job, in Schopenhauer's steady view, is rarely brought off in a successful way. For in "the boundless egotism of our nature there is joined more or less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancor, and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent's tooth, and waiting only an opportunity of venting itself and then, like a demon unchained, of storming and raging." Not exactly what we should nowadays call a fun guy, Schopenhauer.

Most of us could still sleep decently if accused of any of the other six deadly sins; but to be accused of envy would be seriously distressing, so clearly does such an accusation go directly to character.

the so-called sexual revolution, for example, "rather a prim term for the lurid carnival that actually took place.

felony muscles

systematically murderous totalitarian system of all, conspired in their own death, was yet a fourth savant-idiot. The classic American savant-idiot, surely, was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization "the cancer of human history";

Susan Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.

no contemporary painting could have any serious standing without a critical theory certifying and explaining it. Twenty-five years from

the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is "that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.

A man who always carried a well-lubricated status detector, he settled in at Harvard.

In an otherwise perfectly mediocre presidency, the one savvy thing John F. Kennedy did, at least for his own reputation, was to bring these Cambridge intellectuals on board.

He never bragged about how well he had done in business, but it was clear that he was pleased by the fact that, living by his few tight moral maxims—keep your overhead low, don't live beyond your means, always put something away for a rainy day—he had come out a winner. Always a methodical businessman, my

Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

surely better to be a nation than to be mistreated by one." The Jews "are forced to be a 'nation' by the nationalism of the others

Yiddish mensch becomes a clear approbative, a man of honor and integrity, but it also means a real, a genuine person, someone who is even possibly flawed but has known travail, yet has come through not only

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

so many artists and scientists, the youthful Zweig found school a great bore.

Hyde Park seemed a good place for high-IQ misfits, blessed with dazzling minds or imaginations but unequipped to take life straight on;