“Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

“Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.”

“Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.”

“We have not many wills, but only one --it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.”

“I personally think that what the big (writers) have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.The little ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace.”

“[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”