I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country that tolerates evil means – evil manners, standards of ethics – for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.
Eddie Fislinger’s church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.
Honestly, I think that the sense of humor of the people that TALK about having a ‘sense of humor’ is a worse vice than drinking.
We don’t want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning.
In some respects, writing was his only form of human interaction.
Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated – tortured – slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!
Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
Pictures? Why talk stupidly about pictures when he could talk intelligently about engines? Languages? If he had nothing to say, what was the good of saying it in three languages? Manners? These presumable dukes and dignitaries whom he was passing on Pall Mall might be able to enter a throne-room more loftily, but he didn’t want to enter a throne-room.
Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.
What an eternal art it is – such a glittery delightful art – finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves!
All the Utopias – Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall – and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.
I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don’t know, they don’t understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound.” – Carol Kennicott.
I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.
Always she had a genius for keeping herself superior to him by just the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle- pointed comparison of him with defter men.
There was nothing to say to tragedy that had outlived hope.
Certainly Lewis failed – or refused – to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth.
As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.
The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers. It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus – even now.