A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, qu… - Mary McCarthy

Nobody can stay in the right — I mean in real life — that's the terrible thing, Warren. If you think you're in the right for more than a few seconds, you'll find that you're in the wrong. Nobody can have a permanent claim on being the injured party; it seems horribly unfair, but there it is. As soon as you feel injured and begin to cry for justice, you discover that your position has gotten undermined; the ground has shifted beneath you, in a slow sort of landslide, and you find yourself cut off.

[I]t is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.