We Do Not Live In

Culture's Essential Service To A Religion Is To Destroy Intellectual Idolatry, The Recurrent Tendency In Religion To Replace The Object Of Its Worship With Its Present Understanding And Forms Of Approach To That Object.

The Bedrock Of Doubt Is The Total Nothingness Of Death. Death Is A Leveler, Not Because Everybody Dies, But Because Nobody Understands What Death Means.

A Reader Who Quarrels With Postulates, Who Dislikes Hamlet Because He Does Not Believe That There Are Ghosts Or That People Speak In Pentameters, Clearly Has No Business In Literature. He Cannot Distinguish Fiction From Fact, And Belongs In The Same Category As The People Who Send Checks To Radio Stations For The Relief Of Suffering Heroines In Soap Operas.

Our Country Has Shown A Lack Of Will To Resist Its Own Disintegration .. . Canada Is Practically The Only Country Left In The World Which Is A Pure Colony; Colonial In Psychology As Well As In Mercantile Economics.

What If Criticism Is A Science As Well As An Art? Not A Pure Or Exact Science, Of Course, But These Phrases Belong To A Nineteenth-century Cosmology Which Is No Longer With Us.