“No one could leave the group by his or her own volition and put the group at risk of having its secrets revealed.”

“In perhaps the most revealing of all the health-related studies, a group of subjects who had contracted malignant melanoma received traditional treatment and then were divided into two groups. One group met weekly for only six weeks; the other did not. Facilitators taught the first group of recovering patients specific communication skills. (When it's your life that's at stake, could anything be more crucial?) After meeting only six times and then dispersing for five years, the subjects who learned how to express themselves effectively had a higher survival rate--only 9 percent succumbed as opposed to almost 30 percent in the untrained group.”

“The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.”

“... Well, some day i'm going to get in with that wild artistic group. It's the only thing that makes this town different.""The 'wild artistic group,' as you put it, has an average age of fifty-seven, and most of us have heart disease and bladder trouble...”

“Foreign lands never yield their secrets to a traveller. The best they offer are tantalising snippets, just enough to inflame the imagination. The secrets they do reveal are your own - the ones you have kept from yourself. And this is reason enough to travel, to leave home.”

“Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”