Sons of suicides seldom do well.

Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.