“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.”

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

The need to find meaning is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

We must have a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Contentment can be bought at a price that one can not possibly pay.

Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything.

Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.

What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

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.

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

At the end of the day, women are a distraction. Whether you realize it or not.

At the end of the day, they, too, want development of their constituency, state or country.

We did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.

The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.

For the millionth time, I’m retired. I keep saying it, and people keep answering, ‘Well, maybe he doesn’t mean it this time.’ But I do.