Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

Sometimes good things fall apart, so better things can fall together.

Growing up, I didn't know my parents were famous. I just thought they knew everybody. Everyone was always saying, 'Hi, Billy,' 'Hi, Christie.' I thought they were just popular.

You always hear about waste and abuse in Washington. And usually it doesn't mean much, because nobody ever finds where that waste and abuse is.

I think Obamacare has now taken over almost from regulation, which is ridiculous what's happening with overregulation, as the biggest single problem for opening and keeping businesses going.

I am a very mediocre intellect, at best, and I am smarter than most people I know - and that terrifies me.

Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another.

The pencil you leave it there, and it's dead. It doesn't do anything and it doesn't move by itself. It doesn't offer anything; it's totally submissive to you.

i'm never going to understand the Barrani." "You needn't sound so morose, Lord Kaylin. They are unlikely to understand you either." "Yes, but I'm unlikely to try to kill them for fun.

The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

The women sit, getting colder and colder, on a seat getting harder and harder, watching oafs, getting muddier and muddier.