[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.