When I was young, my peers prepared to endure 20 years of hardship, and if fortunate, perhaps enjoy a bit more comfort in old age. Now, young people want to live well from the start. When it comes to...

Society is capricious and rewards the bad as often as the good. But it never rewards the quiet.

Well, and you may have lived in the courts of the Old Lord, and you were accounted beautiful, but I have been a man's wife and I have borne him sons, and you are still a slave.

Everyone is an actor. In the end, everyone wants applause.

You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll...

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, is "insane." To

When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody...

Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely...

George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn't grow on trees. This is what made our...

I've long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.

As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if...

A sense of humor... is superior to any religion so far devised.

Have you ever noticed I said how everyone says they want to be different, but as soon as they meet someone who really is different, they ostracize them?

When acting and being as you are now, you are determining the way of being and acting of others.

To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people's whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind's still there, blowing away.

The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.

Common right is nought but the protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection of all is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregated sovereignties is...

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits...

For her life, like human life everywhere on the planet, had speeded up and speeded up until peace was rarely possible. Always there was movement, noise, inevitable and constant distraction {. ...} a...

Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

It {is} that courage that Africa most desperately needs.

A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.