Crystal

“The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.
It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.

And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not.”
― Clifford D. Simak, City

“When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“licentiousness has seldom produced the loss of liberty; but that the tyranny of rulers has almost always effected it.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“When I tried to envision how my dogs would react to a system where they spent two-fifths of the year locked up in the sort of cages used to fly animals in the baggage compartment of airplanes, the first-month-of-gestation solution suddenly no longer seemed all that great.”
― Barry Estabrook, Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat