Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.