William F. Buckley Excerpts

Excerpts from the works of William F. Buckley Jr., who died Wednesday at age 82:

"I was in a radio exchange with the senior U.S. liberal, Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in a casual survey of technology stunned me by saying that, in his judgment, `word processing is the greatest invention in modern history.' Suddenly I was face to face with the flip side of Paradise. That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?" — from "The Dictionary, Ready at Hand," an essay about computers.

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"I arrived in Switzerland with only a single idea in mind. And that idea was to commit literary iconoclasm. I would write a book in which the good guys and the bad guys were actually distinguishable from one another. I took a deep breath and further resolved that the good guys would be — the Americans." — on the origins of his Blackford Oakes spy novels.

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"You have shortened sail just a little, because you want more steadiness than you are going to get at this speed, the wind up to twenty-two, twenty-four knots, and it is late at night, and there are only two of you in the cockpit. You are moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and waters roar by, themselves exuberantly subdued by your powers to command your way through them. Triumphalism ... and the stars also seem to be singing together for joy." — from the sailing essay "Thoughts on a Final Passage."

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