A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

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 function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

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.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

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