The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.