Quotes By Author | Novelguide

"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."

"If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give."

"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."

"Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment."

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced."

"World War II was the last government program that really worked."

"If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.) Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National."

"A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy."

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."

"You can't set a hen in one morning and have chicken salad for lunch."

"For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather, every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously."

"Life is half spent before we know what it is."

"War makes thieves and peace hangs them."

"To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted."

"The secret to film is that it's an illusion."

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."

"The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation."

"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U. S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate."

"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."

"A great artist is always before his time or behind it."

"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves."

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life."

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."

"One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human."