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.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.