The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty, necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.