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

The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.

There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.