There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.