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

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

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

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.

And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.