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"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."
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"Not all single women want to be married. Not all boys like football. Not all homemakers like to cook. Not all messy people are lazy. And not all the obese are gluttons. There are glands and diabetes and a dozen conditions you never heard of that may account for things. Put your sermon through the counter-stereotype sieve."

"There should be no discrimination against languages people speak, skin color, or religion."

"A spoon does not know whether it enters a rich or poor man's mouth."

"Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, "Gentlemen, let's proceed," and sensing Ellie's frown would add, "Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys." The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female."

"I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead."

"No matter where you are in life at the moment, you still remain as important as everyone else."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."

"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."

"In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem."

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
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