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Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

In Europe, the big word is tolerance. You tolerate everything.

Let's be careful when we start comparing American to European tolerance because there isn't necessarily a lot of European tolerance.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women.

The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.