“We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.”

Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover’s insecurity.

‎ When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.

we came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

Sorrow is brief but joy is endless.

It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

Unless you’re playing a real character based on a real person, if someone else has done it before, you’re probably better off not watching it as an actor. Otherwise you end up trying to copy someone else.

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.

I’ve always regretted that I’m made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.