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.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.

Suicide kills two people.

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.