English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

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.

I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.