Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

One of the less dismaying aspects of race relations in the United States is that their improvement is not a matter of a few people having a great deal of courage. It is a matter of a great many people having just a little courage.

In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.

I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

the psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy. ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it.