A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

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.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.