... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.