“Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates.”

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 9, p. 137

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.
Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Kinsey Millhone
"A" Is for Alibi (1982)

Swenson, 1959, p. 28
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

The Single Hound, p. 257
Collected Poems (1993)

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D. C., right now.

Source: Games People Play

A Conversation With Neal Stephenson http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm