The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.

The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.

The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.