I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You m… - Norman Mailer

The best they could? I don’t think so.” He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. “Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It’s to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That’s the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they’re superior.” Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound.

Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.