Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.