Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why. - Nadine Gordimer

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”

When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.'