The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.