There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
You have more people that love you than you know.
In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera – or war or fiction.
Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.
It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
I love America, but I don’t like it.
In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.