Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Aldous Huxley, Henry Wimbush, in

Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.

Bible

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

George Bernard Shaw

Marches alone won't bring integration when human respect is disintegratin'

Barry McGuire

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Mark Twain

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H. L. Mencken

Prayer is a strong wall and fortress of the church it is a goodly Christian weapon.

Martin Luther King Jr.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

Edward Steichen

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

Benjamin Haydon

In this unbelievable universe in which we live there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.

Pearl Buck, A Bridge for Passing

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Wallace Stevens

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements and found that they called themselves or it sounded just as bad in English 'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.

Christopher Hitchens