Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it..

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced..

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their asset….

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again..

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected….

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, with….

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other ….

A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty..

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel..

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself..

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is….

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it..

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say th….

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power..

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation..

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide..

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time..

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society..

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started..

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality..

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place….