“If once we go upon niceties of construction, we shall not know where to stop. For one nicety is made a foundation for another; and that other for a third; and so on, without end.”

1997 interview with John Perry Barlow, as reported on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/JPBarlow/status/104518695333789697

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), chapter 5.
Context: A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

Source: Short fiction, The Iron Tactician (2016), p. 630

Radio address (28 July 1942), as quoted by Sir Courtauld Thomson, in a House of Lords debate on bombing policy (9 February 1944) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1944/feb/09/bombing-policy

1940s, Address accepting the Presidency of the CIO (1952)
Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world.
Source: Address accepting the Presidency of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 4, 1952, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 51

Source: Life Lessons

Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, P.83

Source: On the Road