Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

God listens to our weeping when the occasion itself is beyond our knowledge but still within His love and power.

I want to see how far I can go and how good I can be, whether it's in the classroom or on the football field.

I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.

It's more important to promote a culture of life. What I mean by that is that I believe what we need to do is not change the law, but change hearts.

Show me that you are redeemed, and I will believe in your Redeemer.

"I feel like, like pudding," Iggy groaned. "Pudding with nerve endings. Pudding in great pain."

I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice.

Secularism for the Congress is merely a slogan while for the BJP it is an article of faith. Secularism is about votebank politics for the Congress, while it is about 'India first' for the BJP.

Fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.

It was the greatest contribution towards the whole of human race, made by China, is to prevent its 1.3 billion people from hunger.