Democracy Is The Fig Leaf Of Elitism.

Insecurity Breeds Treachery: If You Are Kind To People Who Hate Themselves, They Will Hate You As Well.

I Cherish The Review-as-literature; As Lapidary Journalism In The Eighteenth-century Mode, The Last Hard Sparkling Diamond In Theessayists's Tarnished Crown. To Me, Writing A Good Review Is Not Just A Way To Make Extra Money, But A Sacred Duty.

Kings And Queens Might Do Wicked Things, But They Don't Nag. One Thing I Like About Bloody Mary: She Never Said A Word About Lung Cancer.

As The Only Class Distinction Available In A Democracy, The College Degree Has Created A Caste Society As Rigid As Ancient India's. Condemning Elitism And Simultaneously Quaking In Fear That Our Children Won't Become Members Of The Elite, We Send Them To College, Not To Learn, But To "be" College Graduates, Rationalizing Our Snobbery With The Cliché That High Technology Has Eliminated The Need For The Manual Labor That We Secretly Hold In Contempt.

There Are So Many Different Kinds Of People In America, With So Many Different Boiling Points, That We Don't Know How To Fight With Each Other. The Set Piece That Shapes And Contains Quarrels In Homogeneous Countries Does Not Exist Here. The Frenchman Is An Expert On The Precise Gradations Of Espèce De And The Italian Knows Exactly When To Introduce The Subject Of His Other's Grave, But No American Can Be Sure How Or When Another Will React, So We Zap Each Other With Friendliness To Neutralize Potentially Dangerous Situations.