Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.

Individuality is freedom lived.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.