Power is the ability not to have to please.

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.

I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably sinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them.

Humor is an antidote to isolation.