By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.