“People far too easily neglect or abuse us, as soon as we become intimate with them. To live pleasantly, one must almost always remain a stranger in the crowd.”

“I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.”

“If use becomes abuse, we should intervene at once, for if abuse becomes habit, then there is no remedy.”

“Most of us remain strangers to ourselves, hiding who we are, and ask other strangers, hiding who they are, to love us.”

“We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.”

“How many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.”

“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal -– that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will. That’s the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That’s the tradition we must uphold. That’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.”

“What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?”

“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state… It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”

“… sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?"
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”