We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.