That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

There is another side to chivalry. If it dispenses leniency, it may with equal justification invoke control.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

Of all the tyrannies which have usurped power over humanity, few have been able to enslave the mind and body as imperiously as drug addiction.

Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

There is hardly any deviancy, no matter how reprehensible in one context, which is not extolled as a virtue in another. There are no natural crimes, only legal ones.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this., New York Times, April 19, 1992]

When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

I flinch. Maybe you have to be male to understanding that castration can't be reduced to finger-scissors and some onomatopoeia.

You've got to think lucky. If you fall into a mudhole, check your back pocket - you might have caught a fish.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

A religion shapes the world of its believers by identifying questions that need answers and providing answers that people 'know' to be true. ­

I believe that voting is the first act of building a community as well as building a country.

Beer may cause you to digress - and lead a happier life.

No one starts out on top. You have to work your way up.