The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. - Louis Kronenberger

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.