Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.
The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.
Society is an insane asylum run by the inmates.
All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.
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.
Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.
Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.