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

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

The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

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.

... organized religion, in a dominating business society, can do only one of two things. It can either assure the communicant with uneasy bluster that God Himself likes money -- a theory which convinces nobody -- or it can give him an apologetic, halfhearted invitation to go out and get himself crucified.

A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.