Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.