I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

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.

To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it.