Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff.

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.