It is charming the way everyone in the South says, 'Come back.' This is the regulation farewell at gas stations, soda fountains, general stores, tourist camps. 'Come back,' they call, 'come back.' Do they feel marooned in one place, lost, needing to believe someone will return to share their exile on the similar main streets, in the varied but always new-looking land?

I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.

the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

We lisp in numbers, in the U.S. We are deluged by ample, often mysterious statistics. ... Like many in this country, I have come to regard statistics with doubt and merely as a hint of the probable shape of fact.