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

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.

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.

The easy path is seldom the right path.

The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?

Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought "Fu** this, " and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.

Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.

It's so hard to get up again—although of course the harder it is the more satisfaction you have when you do get up, haven't you?

Dreadful is the mysterious power of fate; there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by walled city or dark, seabeaten ships.

Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn't.